MrMagoo
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
I’m just coming out with random stuff now, isn’t a lot of Canada Scottish as well?
A crumb of a clue on epidemiology
- Thread starter Murph
- Start date
Yeah, it looks to be higher than in the US:
Scottish Canadians
Scottish Americans
Also higher when considering the more general British ancestry:
British Canadians
British Americans
If British ancestry were a risk factor for ME/CFS, then presumably we'd see a larger prevalence in Canada. I don't know if we have any good studies on that.
But if we are considering the Google Trends data for the past 22 years, the search interest in Canada for ME/CFS is only barely higher than in the US (scores are 18 vs. 16), which seems to go against the idea of British propensity for ME/CFS.
One slightly frustrating thing about Google Trends is that the data does not appear to be consistent if downloaded on different days, even if representing the same time span and search term.
The 22 year data for ME/CFS I was using was downloaded on 2026-03-24, and represents the time span of 2004-01-01 to 2004-03-24. I re-downloaded the data for the same time span today, and it is not the same. Of course, I probably shouldn't have included the present date of March 24 within the range of the time span for the original download, as the day wasn't done yet, but the additional few hours shouldn't meaningfully change the results that represent 22 years of data.
Others have commented about the inconsistency elsewhere, with the explanation given that the Trends data is not based on all Google searches, but is instead based on a relatively small sample. On a different day, the search interest for a topic could have been recalculated with a different sample, changing the results.
Thankfully, the values don't change by a huge amount. Here I have plotted the data I used for the previous analyses based on the 22 years of ME/CFS trends data, against the data I have re-downloaded today based on the same time span.
It's highly correlated, so shouldn't change results too much, but I wanted to note this to avoid confusion in case anyone follows the links to the Trends data I provided and sees that what it shows doesn't exactly match what I described in my posts.
The 22 year data for ME/CFS I was using was downloaded on 2026-03-24, and represents the time span of 2004-01-01 to 2004-03-24. I re-downloaded the data for the same time span today, and it is not the same. Of course, I probably shouldn't have included the present date of March 24 within the range of the time span for the original download, as the day wasn't done yet, but the additional few hours shouldn't meaningfully change the results that represent 22 years of data.
Others have commented about the inconsistency elsewhere, with the explanation given that the Trends data is not based on all Google searches, but is instead based on a relatively small sample. On a different day, the search interest for a topic could have been recalculated with a different sample, changing the results.
Thankfully, the values don't change by a huge amount. Here I have plotted the data I used for the previous analyses based on the 22 years of ME/CFS trends data, against the data I have re-downloaded today based on the same time span.
It's highly correlated, so shouldn't change results too much, but I wanted to note this to avoid confusion in case anyone follows the links to the Trends data I provided and sees that what it shows doesn't exactly match what I described in my posts.