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Observational study uncovers a surge in toothache search queries across 16 countries during COVID-19 lockdowns, indicating critical demand for urgent dental care during health emergencies.
Background: Lockdowns due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic forced many dental offices to be closed.This study aims to investigate the association between COVID-19 imposed lockdowns and online searches for toothache using Google Trends (GT).Methods: We investigated GT online searches for the term "toothache" within the past 5 years.The time frame for data gathering was considered as the initiation and end dates of national/regional lockdowns in each country.We used 1-way analysis of variance to identify statistical differences in relative search volumes (RSVs) between 2020 and 2016-2019 for each country.Results: Overall, 16 countries were included in our analyses.Among all countries, Indonesia (n = 100), Jamaica (n = 56), Philippines (n = 56), Iran (n = 52), and Turkey (47) had the highest RSVs for toothache in the specified period.Compared with the previous 4 years, higher RSVs were seen in the world (as a whole) (2020 RSVs, 94.4; vs 2019 RSVs, 77.8 [P < 0.001]) and 13 countries (81.3% of the included countries).Conclusion: Generally, searching for the term "toothache" showed an increase during the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 compared with the past 4 years.This can imply the importance of dental care as urgent medical care during public health emergencies such as COVID-19.
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Sofi‐Mahmudi et al. (2023) studied this question.
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