Publications by authors named "Steffen Springer"

Background And Objectives: In recent years, there has been an increase in skin cancer. The aim of this study was therefore to investigate the representation of skin cancer in public awareness worldwide and in Germany, and to determine whether Skin Cancer Awareness Month is represented in the search interests of the Internet-using population in the same way as Breast Cancer Awareness Month worldwide.

Data And Methods: In this study, Google Trends data were used to track levels of public awareness for different tumor entities and skin cancer types worldwide and for Germany.

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Article Synopsis
  • The COVID-19 pandemic led to significant health, social, and economic changes, prompting lockdowns and other protective measures that not only targeted COVID-19 but also impacted other infectious diseases.
  • A study used anonymized case numbers from the German Robert Koch Institute and Google Trends data to analyze how these measures affected the incidence and public interest in diseases like influenza and measles in Germany.
  • Findings indicated a notable decline in cases for several infectious diseases during the pandemic, attributed to implemented anti-pandemic measures, alongside an increased public interest in COVID-19 and awareness of other diseases.
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The coronavirus or COVID-19 pandemic represents a health event with far-reaching global consequences, triggering a strong search interest in related topics on the Internet worldwide. The use of search engine data has become commonplace in research, but a universal standard for comparing different works is desirable to simplify the comparison. The coronavirus pandemic's enormous impact and media coverage have triggered an exceptionally high search interest.

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Objectives: The objective was to analyze in silico public search interest during the COVID-19 pandemic for some classic infectious childhood diseases, e.g., measles, mumps, chickenpox, scarlet fever, and inflammatory diseases like Kawasaki disease and the pediatric inflammatory multisystem syndrome (PIMS).

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Global efforts have been made to end the COVID-19 pandemic. Among other things, various vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, partly based on novel principles, have been developed internationally within a short time. While initially the hardly available vaccines were distributed according to criteria according to defined priorities, in Germany, after the prioritization has been lifted, attempts are being made to provide as many people as possible with vaccinations.

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In some COVID-19 patients, symptoms persist for several weeks and sometimes, after the acute disease phase, these patients develop new symptoms, which then represents a transition into the so-called long COVID. The exact demarcation of the terms and generally applicable definitions are still discussed, but the phenomenon is most commonly referred to as long COVID. In this study, Google Trends data have been used to track levels of public awareness for long COVID and some important symptoms during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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We noticed an increase in the relative number of published papers on topics such as infoveillance, infodemiology and Google Trends. Collected PubMed data are from the period of January 2020 to March 2021 and were searched with the use of five keywords: infoveillance, infodemiology, Google Trends, diabetes and . We compared an increase in the number of papers from PubMed with search interest expressed in Google Trends.

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Objective: A handheld device was developed and qualified for in vivo human skin evaluation using laser speckle imaging technology.

Methods: Each laser speckle device prototype allows the choice of up to three different laser wavelengths in the range of 400 nm to 800 nm in total. Speckle pattern analysis gives various speckle parameters, for example, speckle contrast, speckle size, speckle modulation or fractal dimension.

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Negative-pressure wound therapy (NPWT) is an advantageous treatment option in wound management to promote healing and reduce the risk of complications. NPWT is mainly carried out using open-cell polyurethane (PU) foams that stimulate granulation tissue formation. However, growth of wound bed tissue into foam material, leading to disruption of newly formed tissue upon dressing removal, has been observed.

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