The diagnosis of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), which is a chronic and complex disease that affects the immune system, is often delayed. SLE can be easily missed because patients may have a wide range of symptoms, many of which are invisible and episodic. Furthermore, these diseases are uncommon, but represent an important public health concern as they tend to affect more young women and individuals belonging to historically marginalized race and ethnicity groups, whose members also suffer more severe disease and poorer outcomes. When treatments are started late in the disease, patients can develop complications such as kidney failure, heart attacks, strokes, and even death. Prior research has shown that a lack of disease awareness and understanding can contribute to diagnostic and treatment delay.

Google Trends (GT) is a new tool that can be used to look at how much people are searching online for information about diseases over time and by location. A previous study showed that patients with lupus use the Internet frequently for information about their disease, rather than relying on their healthcare professional. The purpose of this project is to use GT to see if there are any patterns in how much people are searching for information about SLE in different parts of Canada and over the last twenty years. This type of study has been successfully used to look at public awareness for other diseases already such as COVID-19 and cancer.

Using GT, we analyzed the number and type of searches on Google web, images, news, shopping, and YouTube for SLE from 2004 to present. We break down the searches by topic such as diagnosis, treatment, prevention/complications, and resources for support, search questions, and by location in Canada.