With just one sentence, Barbie piqued women’s curiosity about gynecology.
Turns out last year’s smash hit — raking in $1.36 billion as the highest grossing movie of 2023 — has had a wider reach than anticipated.
Published in JAMA Network Open, scientists from the National Bureau of Economic Research, Harvard Medical School, McGill University and Massachusetts General Hospital penned a research letter comparing the film to journalist Katie Couric’s livestreamed colonoscopy and the “Charlie Sheen effect” on HIV awareness. The authors explained that celebrities have generated health awareness in myriad ways through the years.
“Barbie” managed to do so with just a single line of dialogue featured right at the film’s end: “I’m here to see my gynecologist.”
“We hypothesized that this final line may have spurred public interest in gynecologic care,” the authors said.
To get to the bottom of it, they performed a cross-sectional study of online search trends in the United States just after the movie’s release, focusing on 34 queries related to women’s health care. The results were then compared to an “autoregressive integrated moving average” based on weekly search data for the same queries from June 2022 to a week before the film’s debut.
“Our results suggest that Barbie’s closing line may have spurred interest in gynecology, further suggesting the potential influence of popular films on health literacy and awareness,” the researchers said. “While there were no changes in search volume associated with seeking care, a primary limitation of the study is that such changes in behavior may not be adequately captured by search trends, and in particular, they may be temporally far removed from changes in awareness.”
There was a 51.3% boon in internet searches referring to gynecologists the week following the movie’s release, as well as a 151.1% increase in searches for the term’s definition. But when compared to the average weekly data from before the film’s debut, the total number of searches for gynecologist appointments didn’t budge.
“No changes were observed for search terms reflecting broader health interest (eg, searches for doctors’ appointments), supporting the assumption that the observed increase in gynecologist-related searches may have been influenced by the film’s release and not other factors,” they added.
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