Breast Cancer Screening and Social Media: a Content Analysis of Evidence Use and Guideline Opinions on Twitter

Abstract

There is ongoing debate regarding the best mammography screening practices. Twitter has become a powerful tool for disseminating medical news and fostering healthcare conversations; however, little work has been done examining these conversations in the context of how users are sharing evidence and discussing current guidelines for breast cancer screening. To characterize the Twitter conversation on mammography and assess the quality of evidence used as well as opinions regarding current screening guidelines, individual tweets using mammography-related hashtags were prospectively pulled from Twitter from 5 November 2015 to 11 December 2015. Content analysis was performed on the tweets by abstracting data related to user demographics, content, evidence use, and guideline opinions. Standard descriptive statistics were used to summarize the results. Comparisons were made by demographics, tweet type (testable claim, advice, personal experience, etc.), and user type (non-healthcare, physician, cancer specialist, etc.). The primary outcomes were how users are tweeting about breast cancer screening, the quality of evidence they are using, and their opinions regarding guidelines. The most frequent user type of the 1345 tweets was "non-healthcare" with 323 tweets (32.5%). Physicians had 1.87 times higher odds (95% CI, 0.69-5.07) of providing explicit support with a reference and 11.70 times higher odds (95% CI, 3.41-40.13) of posting a tweet likely to be supported by the scientific community compared to non-healthcare users. Only 2.9% of guideline tweets approved of the guidelines while 14.6% claimed to be confused by them. Non-healthcare users comprise a significant proportion of participants in mammography conversations, with tweets often containing claims that are false, not explicitly backed by scientific evidence, and in favor of alternative "natural" breast cancer prevention and treatment. Furthermore, users appear to have low approval and confusion regarding screening guidelines. These findings suggest that more efforts are needed to educate and disseminate accurate information to the general public regarding breast cancer prevention modalities, emphasizing the safety of mammography and the harms of replacing conventional prevention and treatment modalities with unsubstantiated alternatives.

"Clicks, likes, shares and comments" a systematic review of breast cancer screening discourse in social media

“…As stated by Nastasi, A., Bryant, T., Canner, J. K., et al (2017) in their own Twitter study, "Non-healthcare users comprise a significant proportion of participants in mammography conversations, with tweets often containing claims that are false, not explicitly backed by scientific evidence, and in favor of alternative "natural" breast cancer prevention and treatment." [27].…”

“…[24][25][26] The online presence of scientifically unfounded and misleading breast cancer screening information (mammography causes breast cancer, breast cancer can be prevented by organic food) is evidenced by other studies, too. [27] Nastasi, A., Bryant, T., Canner, J. K., Dredze, M., Camp, M. S., Nagarajan, N. (2018) found that only 61% of the 323 tweets posted by lay people had scientific support. The scientifically false tweets are liked and shared as often as the reliable ones in this study.…”

“…Depending on the topic, 5%-20% of links are to peer reviewed journals. [27] Posts critical to screening often referred to journal articles, too, illustrating that there is scientific evidence for both for and against screening. As expected, this study also found that lay people are less likely to cite evidence in the form of links than are healthcare professionals.…”

“…Negative sentiments are expressed to a smaller degree. [27,30] Although a minority of lay people voiced negative sentiments regarding the ineffectiveness and dangers of breast screening and content mentioning pain and anxiety associated with mammography screening as well as widespread criticism of US screening guidelines, screening is still generally viewed as beneficial.…”

Increasing Interest of Mass Communication Media and the General Public in the Distribution of Tweets About Mental Disorders: Observational Study (Preprint)

“…Moreover, the qualitative and quantitative relevance of tweets has been shown in various investigations, including analyses of the interests and feelings of the general population with respect to health/disease, the interactions between patients and doctors/health providers and the generation of the scientific impact of medical research in the news media. Furthermore, patient attitudes toward various medical topics, including vaccines, illnesses, pain, drug use, and both oncological and cardiovascular disease, have been analyzed [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31]. Consequently, the analysis of distributed tweets by primary social media channels on mental health disease and the frequency of retweets generated may be effective tools for assessing social and individual interest toward psychiatric diseases.…”