BACKGROUND: Contraceptive method choice is often strongly influenced by the experiences and opinions of one's social network. Although social media, including Twitter, increasingly influences reproductive-age individuals, discussion of contraception in this setting has yet to be characterized. Natural language processing, a type of machine learning in which computers analyze natural language data, enables this analysis. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to illuminate temporal trends in attitudes toward long-and short-acting reversible contraceptive methods in tweets between 2006 and 2019 and establish social media platforms as alternate data sources for large-scale sentiment analysis on contraception. STUDY DESIGN: We studied English-language tweets mentioning reversible prescription contraceptive methods between March 2006 (founding of Twitter) and December 2019. Tweets mentioning contraception were extracted using search terms, including generic or brand names, colloquial names, and abbreviations. We characterized and performed sentiment analysis on tweets. We used Mann-Kendall nonparametric tests to assess temporal trends in the overall number and the number of positive, negative, and neutral tweets referring to each method. The code to reproduce this analysis is available at https://github.com/ hms-dbmi/contraceptionOnTwitter. RESULTS:We extracted 838,739 tweets mentioning at least 1 contraceptive method. The annual number of contraception-related tweets increased considerably over the study period. The intrauterine device was the most commonly referenced method (45.9%). Long-acting methods were mentioned more often than short-acting ones (58% vs 42%), and the annual proportion of long-acting reversible contraceptionrelated tweets increased over time. In sentiment analysis of tweets mentioning a single contraceptive method (n¼665,064), the greatest proportion of all tweets was negative (65,339 of 160,713 tweets with at least 95% confident sentiment, or 40.66%). Tweets mentioning longacting methods were nearly twice as likely to be positive compared with tweets mentioning short-acting methods (19.65% vs 10.21%; P<.002). CONCLUSION: Recognizing the influence of social networks on contraceptive decision making, social media platforms may be useful in the collection and dissemination of information about contraception.
Among patients with COVID-19 evaluated in outpatient settings, factors associated with hospitalization remain poorly understood. Multivariable regressions were used to assess sociodemographic and clinical factors associated with increased odds of hospitalization among patients with confirmed COVID-19 between March 18, 2020 through April 25, 2020 at a community-based outpatient clinic in Massachusetts. Older age, BMI ≥ 25, self-reported dizziness/lightheadedness, temperature ≥ 99.5°F, tachycardia, and oxygen saturation < 95% were associated with increased odds of hospitalization after adjustment for age, sex, and BMI. There was also an association between speaking Spanish as primary language and increased odds of hospitalization (compared to English, adjusted OR = 2.99 [95% CI 1.39, 6.39]). Speaking Portuguese as primary language was not associated with increased odds of hospitalization (compared to English, adjusted OR = 1.83 [0.78, 4.28]). In addition to several clinical risk factors established among inpatients, our study found that primarily speaking Spanish, but not Portuguese, was a marker of hospitalization risk among a diverse outpatient cohort of patients with COVID-19.
While structural changes within the retina of psychosis patients have been established, no detailed studies of choroidal microvasculature in these patients have been performed. Given evidence of microvascular disruption in psychosis patients, this study sought to determine whether there exists evidence of microvascular disruption in the choroids in these patients. Methods: Fifty-six subjects (20 controls and 36 psychosis patients) were recruited from April 2018 to February 2020. Five were excluded due to imaging artifact or missing demographic information. Swept-source optical coherence tomography angiography (SS-OCTA) images were obtained. Choroid vascular enface images (12 mm × 9mm) were exported every 2.6 μm from Bruch's membrane to the choroid-scleral interface from Topcon to ImageJ. The images were binarized using Otsu's method, signal from the optic disk and retinal vasculature was removed, and average choroid vascular density (CVD) was calculated as the average of percent area occupied by choroidal vasculature across images in the stack. Choroid vascular volume (CVV) was calculated as the CVD multiplied by maximum CT and image area. During image analysis, study staff were blinded to the phenotype of the study subjects. Results: Compared with same-sex controls, male psychiatric patients had significantly lower CVD. Compared with same-sex controls, female psychiatric patients had significantly lower maximum CT with correspondingly decreased CVV, after adjusting for age. When all psychiatric patients were compared with all healthy controls, no significant differences in CT, CVD, or CVV were noted. Conclusion: These results suggest that the pathogenesis of psychotic illness affects choroidal microvasculature in a sex-specific manner.
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