Is these are Trends in Back Pain?

Back pain is a common issue across the globe, increasing due to an ageing population and little physical exercise (the latter is usually considered a good ingredient to improve the situation). However, from 2020 onward, exercise decreased strongly due to policies to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic. Hence, a natural question is whether political lockdown had a negative influence on the prevalence of back pain. One potential mechanism could be higher number of people working from home. But how to detect changes in back pain over time? One way to approach this is to use Google Trends, as it provides quasi instant access to aggregated queries from Google users. Hoerger et al. (2020), Knipe et al. (2020) and Brodeur et al. (2021) use Google Trends to assess the impact of the pandemic on mental health/well being. Szilagyi et al. (2021) compare queries for back pain, before and after the pandemic. Seasonality of back pain in Italy was analyzed by Ciaffi et al. (2021). But can health issues really be traced back to the COVID-19 pandemic, and how?

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