Jankowski Wojciech, Hoffmann Marcin
Faculty of Chemistry, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poznan, Poland.
J Med Internet Res. 2016 Feb 25;18(2):e38. doi: 10.2196/jmir.4033.
Predicting the popularity of and harm caused by psychoactive agents is a serious problem that would be difficult to do by a single simple method. However, because of the growing number of drugs it is very important to provide a simple and fast tool for predicting some characteristics of these substances. We were inspired by the Google Flu Trends study on the activity of the influenza virus, which showed that influenza virus activity worldwide can be monitored based on queries entered into the Google search engine.
Our aim was to propose a fast method for ranking the most popular and most harmful drugs based on easily available data gathered from the Internet.
We used the Google search engine to acquire data for the ranking lists. Subsequently, using the resulting list and the frequency of hits for the respective psychoactive drugs combined with the word "harm" or "harmful", we estimated quickly how much harm is associated with each drug.
We ranked the most popular and harmful psychoactive drugs. As we conducted the research over a period of several months, we noted that the relative popularity indexes tended to change depending on when we obtained them. This suggests that the data may be useful in monitoring changes over time in the use of each of these psychoactive agents.
Our data correlate well with the results from a multicriteria decision analysis of drug harms in the United Kingdom. We showed that Google search data can be a valuable source of information to assess the popularity of and harm caused by psychoactive agents and may help in monitoring drug use trends.
预测精神活性物质的受欢迎程度及其造成的危害是一个严重的问题，很难通过单一的简单方法来完成。然而，由于药物数量不断增加，提供一种简单快速的工具来预测这些物质的某些特性非常重要。我们受到谷歌流感趋势研究的启发，该研究表明，可以根据输入谷歌搜索引擎的查询来监测全球流感病毒的活动。
我们的目的是提出一种基于从互联网收集的容易获得的数据，对最受欢迎和最有害药物进行排名的快速方法。
我们使用谷歌搜索引擎获取排名列表的数据。随后，利用所得列表以及各种精神活性药物与“危害”或“有害”一词组合的搜索命中频率，我们快速估计了每种药物所关联的危害程度。
我们对最受欢迎和最有害的精神活性药物进行了排名。在几个月的研究过程中，我们注意到相对受欢迎指数往往会根据获取时间的不同而变化。这表明这些数据可能有助于监测这些精神活性物质使用情况随时间的变化。
我们的数据与英国药物危害多标准决策分析的结果相关性良好。我们表明，谷歌搜索数据可以成为评估精神活性物质的受欢迎程度及其造成的危害的宝贵信息来源，并可能有助于监测药物使用趋势。
