Aging 2.0: Health Information about Dementia on Twitter

Abstract

Online social media is widespread, easily accessible and attracts a global audience with a widening demographic. As a large proportion of adults now seek health information online and through social media applications, communication about health has become increasingly interactive and dynamic. Online health information has the potential to significantly impact public health, especially as the population gets older and the prevalence of dementia increases. However, little is known about how information pertaining to age-associated diseases is disseminated on popular social media platforms. To fill this knowledge gap, we examined empirically: (i) who is using social media to share information about dementia, (ii) what sources of information about dementia are promoted, and (iii) which dementia themes dominate the discussion. We data-mined the microblogging platform Twitter for content containing dementia-related keywords for a period of 24 hours and retrieved over 9,200 tweets. A coding guide was developed and content analysis conducted on a random sample (10%), and on a subsample from top users’ tweets to assess impact. We found that a majority of tweets contained a link to a third party site rather than personal information, and these links redirected mainly to news sites and health information sites. As well, a large number of tweets discussed recent research findings related to the prediction and risk management of Alzheimer’s disease. The results highlight the need for the dementia research community to harness the reach of this medium and its potential as a tool for multidirectional engagement.

Qualitative Twitter analysis of participants, tweet strategies, and tweet content at a major urologic conference

“…Accordingly, a subgroup of top users, characterized as those with the most followers, inserted links in 92% of their tweets compared to all users with 77%, inserting links in an assessment of Twitter usage to share information about dementia. 19 The amount of links in our study (20%) was slightly lower than in a contemporary Tweet analysis of the AUA and CUA conferences (29%). 4 The vast majority of tweets (88%) took place during scheduled conference hours, with a peak activity of 73 tweets/hour.…”

Data-mining twitter and the autism spectrum disorder: A Pilot study

“…The use of LDA-based health topic modelling topics was explored by Prier et al [21]. Dementiarelated tweets were the focus of work by Robillard et al [22] who collected relevant tweets over a 24h period using keyword filtering and used them to discover the dominant chatter themes. Similarly, Scanfeld et al [25] used Twitter to analyse the patterns of antibiotic use.…”

Increasing Community Awareness About Alzheimer’s Disease in Puerto Rico Through Coffee Shop Education and Social Media

“…Donelle and Booth [22] found that 44.7 % of the breast cancer Facebook groups analyzed for their study were focused on raising funds. Additionally, Twitter has also become a major online social media platform for users to share information [23–25]. A study performed by Robillard et al [25] analyzed tweets related to dementia over a 24-h period and found that 77 % of those tweets contained links to health information websites and recent studies involving reducing the risk of dementia.…”