Vieira Rafael José, Sousa-Pinto Bernardo, Anto Josep M, Sheikh Aziz, Klimek Ludger, Zuberbier Torsten, Fonseca João Almeida, Bousquet Jean
MEDCIDS-Department of Community Medicine, Information and Health Decision Sciences, Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto, Porto, Portugal.
CINTESIS - Center for Health Technology and Services Research, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal.
World Allergy Organ J. 2022 Jun 24;15(7):100660. doi: 10.1016/j.waojou.2022.100660. eCollection 2022 Jul.
Real-world data represent an increasingly important source of knowledge in health care. However, assessing their representativeness can be challenging. We compared (i) real-world data from a mobile app for allergic rhinitis (MASK-air®) on the usage of oral H1-antihistamines from 2016 to 2020 in 10 European countries with (ii) Google Trends data on the relative volume of searches for such antihistamines. For each country, we sorted 5 different oral H1-antihistamines by their frequency of use and volume of searches. We found perfect agreement on the order of antihistamine use in MASK-air® and in Google Trends searches in 4 countries (France, Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom). Different levels of agreement were observed in the remaining countries (kappa coefficient from -0.50 to 0.75). Oral H1-antihistamine data from Google Trends and MASK-air® were consistent with nationwide medication sales data from France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. These results suggest that MASK-air® data may be consistent with other sources of real-world data, although assessing the representativeness of their users may require further studies.
真实世界数据在医疗保健领域正日益成为重要的知识来源。然而，评估其代表性可能具有挑战性。我们比较了：（i）一款用于过敏性鼻炎的移动应用程序（MASK-air®）在2016年至2020年期间10个欧洲国家口服H1抗组胺药使用情况的真实世界数据，与（ii）谷歌趋势上此类抗组胺药搜索相对量的数据。对于每个国家，我们根据5种不同口服H1抗组胺药的使用频率和搜索量进行排序。我们发现，在4个国家（法国、德国、瑞典和英国），MASK-air®中抗组胺药的使用顺序与谷歌趋势搜索中的顺序完全一致。在其余国家观察到不同程度的一致性（kappa系数从-0.50到0.75）。谷歌趋势和MASK-air®的口服H1抗组胺药数据与法国、德国和英国的全国药品销售数据一致。这些结果表明，MASK-air®数据可能与其他真实世界数据来源一致，尽管评估其用户的代表性可能需要进一步研究。
