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 The study team describe their own plunge into the social networking
stream, where they found that they could see what people were
talking about, who was talking and why they were posting about those
issues.
"We were really interested in understanding more about how the
public uses social media to discuss important topics," said senior
author Dr. Raina Merchant, of Penn Medicine Social Media and Health
Innovation Lab at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
She and her colleagues write in JAMA Cardiology that over 300
million people use Twitter to communicate with each other, but it
was unknown whether researchers could separate messages of substance
from noise and ultimately analyze those messages.
For the new study, they searched approximately 10 billion
English-language Twitter posts - known as tweets - originating in
the U.S. between July 2009 and February 2015 for messages about five
cardiovascular and related diseases: high blood pressure, heart
attack, cardiac arrest, heart failure and diabetes.
The search terms included heart attack, coronary attack, diabetes,
mellitus, heart arrest and heart failure.
Overall, they found 550,338 tweets tied to cardiovascular disease.
Of those, about 240,000 mentioned diabetes and about 270,000
mentioned myocardial infarction, the technical name for a heart
attack.
The researchers then did a deeper analysis of a subset of 2,500
tweets.
They found tweets mostly discussed risk factors, followed by tweets
meant to raise awareness and those discussing treatment and
management of health conditions.
Supportive tweets, such as a thank you note sent to Tom Hanks for
revealing his type 2 diabetes diagnosis, were the least common type
of messages.
"We were looking at not just what were they talking about but who
were posting these tweets," said Merchant.
Those who sent tweets about cardiovascular disease tended to be
slightly older than average Twitter users, with a mean age of 28.7
years, versus 25.4. They were also more likely to be female.
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"We also wanted to get a sense of the speed with which information
travels," Merchant said.
She and her coauthors report that Twitter users respond to events -
like World Diabetes Day - within minutes or hours.
Merchant told Reuters Health that she hopes other researchers will
come up with questions and projects that use Twitter.
"We have billions of tweets about how patients and health providers
are thinking about health and heart disease," she said.
In an editor's note accompanying the study, Drs. Mintu Turakhia and
Robert Harrington, of Stanford Medicine in California, write that
there are still many questions left to answer about Twitter's use in
research.
Beyond asking whether there is useful information in all the noise,
they wonder if Twitter is representative of the larger population,
what are the standards for analysis and are there any ethical
issues.
"Although digital health, broadly defined, is in its infancy, the
evidence development is a major priority for JAMA Cardiology," they
write.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2dfFoAL and http://bit.ly/2dfEhkA JAMA
Cardiology, online September 28, 2016.
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