MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Francesco Brigo, MD Department of Neurological and Movement Sciences. Section of Clinical Neurology. University of Verona. Division of Neurology, "Franz Tappeiner" Hospital. Merano (BZ), Italy Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Dr. Brigo: Millions of people surf the Internet every day as a source of health care information looking for materials about symptoms, diagnosis, treatments and their possible adverse effects, or diagnostic procedures. The increasing number of online searches conducted using popular Web search engines, such as Google, generates so-called ‘big data’. This data provides information about online health-related behavior. In this study, I found that the highest peak in Google search volumes related to the terms “Parkinson´s disease” since January 2004 was observed on 15^th August 2014, the day after Robin Williams' wife has revealed the late actor, who died of suicide on 11^th August, was in the early stages of Parkinson's disease.  I proposed to call the phenomenon of increased online searches for a certain disease driven by news of celebrities having that disease as “Robin Williams´ phenomenon”, in honor of the American actor. (more…)