Abstract
Aims
Diabetes is often diagnosed late. This study aimed to assess the possibility for earlier detection of diabetes from search data, using predictive models trained on large-scale data.
Methods
We extracted all English-language queries made by people in the USA to Bing during 1 year and identified queries containing symptoms of diabetes. We compared the ability of four different prediction models (linear regression, logistic regression, decision tree and random forest) to distinguish between users who stated that they were diagnosed with diabetes and users who did not refer to diabetes or diabetes drugs but queried about at least one of the symptoms.
Results
We identified 11,050 “new diabetes users” who stated they had been diagnosed with diabetes and approximately 11.5 million “control users” who queried about symptoms without querying for terms related to diabetes. Both the logistic regression and the random forest models were able to distinguish between the populations with an area under curve of 0.92 which translates to a positive predictive value of 56% at a false-positive rate of 1%. The model could identify patients up to 240 days before they mentioned being diagnosed.
Conclusions
Some undiagnosed diabetes patients can be detected accurately according to their symptom queries to a search engine. Such earlier diagnosis, especially in cases of type 1 diabetes, could be clinically meaningful. The ability of search engines to serve as a population-wide screening tool could potentially be improved using additional data provided by users.
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Availability of data and material
The datasets analyzed during the current study are not publicly available due to privacy and terms of use but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Contributions
IH conceived the study, interpreted the results, and wrote the paper. EYT conceived the study, collected the data, analyzed it and wrote the paper. DD and SN assisted in analyzing the results and wrote the paper.
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EYT is an employee of Microsoft, owner of the Bing search engine. Work described herein was performed as part of the author’s salaried employment. The authors declare no conflict of interest.
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This study was approved by the Behavioral Sciences Research Ethics Committee of the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.
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For this type of study formal informed consent is not required.
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Hochberg, I., Daoud, D., Shehadeh, N. et al. Can internet search engine queries be used to diagnose diabetes? Analysis of archival search data. Acta Diabetol 56, 1149–1154 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00592-019-01350-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00592-019-01350-5