Copyright
©The Author(s) 2023. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
Pandemic and precocious puberty - a Google trends study
Athanasios Tselebis, Department of Psychiatry, “Sotiria” General Chest Diseases Hospital, Athens GR-11527, Greece
Lina Zabuliene, Faculty of Medicine, Vilnius University, Vilnius LT-03101, Lithuania
Charalampos Milionis, Ioannis Ilias, Department of Endocrinology, Elena Venizelou General and Maternity Hospital, Athens GR-11521, Greece
Author contributions: All the authors have contributed to the collection of data and the drafting of the manuscript.
Institutional review board statement: The study was based on data readily available on the Internet, the institutional review board statement was not applicable.
Informed consent statement: The study was based on data readily available on the Internet, the informed consent statement was not applicable.
Conflict-of-interest statement: All the authors report no relevant conflicts of interest for this article.
Data sharing statement: All the search data used are available online at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7152041.
STROBE statement: The authors have read the STROBE Statement-checklist of items, and the manuscript was prepared and revised according to the STROBE Statement-checklist of items.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: https://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Ioannis Ilias, MD, PhD, Consultant Physician-Scientist, Department of Endocrinology, Elena Venizelou General and Maternity Hospital, 2, Elena Venizelou Square, Athens GR-11521, Greece. iiliasmd@yahoo.com
Received: October 6, 2022
Peer-review started: October 6, 2022
First decision: November 22, 2022
Revised: November 29, 2022
Accepted: January 9, 2023
Article in press: January 9, 2023
Published online: January 20, 2023
Peer-review started: October 6, 2022
First decision: November 22, 2022
Revised: November 29, 2022
Accepted: January 9, 2023
Article in press: January 9, 2023
Published online: January 20, 2023
Core Tip
Core Tip: An increasing number of young people are experiencing precocious puberty (PP) during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. We estimated, through relevant internet searches, changes in the epidemiology of PP. We assessed in Google trends searches for PP-related terms in English internationally, and in English and local languages, in countries where a rise in PP has been reported, in the years 2017-2021. More than half of the search terms showed little change or declined. The discrepancy between internet searches for PP and the reported increase in the literature is striking. If our findings are valid, the literature may have been biased.