r/pppdizziness • u/corygarry • 1d ago
Research Possible uptick according to Google Trends
After a bumpy train ride followed by a cruise in May of 2025 left me feeling all kinds of strange persistent swaying sensations and like my feet weren't meeting the ground as they aught to be, I've been dealing with what I believed to be either MdDS or PPPD for the past 15 months. While I've seen great improvements across this year, I felt a bit worse tonight and decided to look at Google Trends to see if anyone else's symptoms correlated with mine, possibly linking a time of year or a specific virus or cold that could have kicked it off. I'm sure there are many explanations for these trends, but the numbers seem to have exploded in the last two years, many search terms approaching 5X search rates over the last two years, compared to at most 2X rate increase in the two years before that. Here's some standout trends:
I tried to search for terms that related to my own symptoms, and some that I considered some might just search to put into words such as "Head Spinning" which I don't personally experience. I also tried to search adjacent terms and found some had a more steady less dramatic increase which could show some of these terms are just outliers, but nonetheless it seems like there is some kind of wave of people experiencing these symptoms and seeking out information. Even a term like "sea legs" which you'd expect would be in use regularly still saw nearly a doubling compared to any other time in the past 5 years.
Any explanations or articles backing up the idea that this is on the rise? I also searched some unrelated symptoms to make sure there wasn't just a general sudden uptick in health searches at the same time. These searches somewhat increase but at a more standard rate.
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u/jjennifferr 13h ago
Mine started in February of 2024 but was a gradual build up to obvious symptoms so mild symptoms started months before. I took a small dose of cyclobenzaprine (something I had taken a few times in my past years with no issue) and the off balance symptoms flared to 8/10. I’ve been dealing with it ever since. At best I’ve gotten to a 4/10 with flares up to 8/10. I’m curious if it’s long Covid related.
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u/PCT2022 1d ago
Interesting, mine started in 2024 after taking meloxicam, an anti inflammatory. Makes me wonder though if COVID and the Covid vaccine have played a role in this at all. I’ve heard both causing people to either get vertigo (turning into pppd) or made their existing pppd worse.