Cervical Cancer Prevention on Instagram: Content and Social Interaction Analysis of Brazilian Accounts

Abstract

Objective: The aim of the present study was to analyse the content of posts on Instagram about cervical cancer. Methods: It was conducted a qualitative analysis using the 50 most popular publicly available Portugueselanguage Instagram posts, containing the hashtags #cervicalcancer, #papsmear, #hpv, #papillomavirus, and #hpvvaccine, during the Brazilian national cervical cancer prevention campaign in March 2018. Results: Posts recruited using #cervicalcancer provided 60% of posts with contents related to secondary prevention; the #papsmear provided 46% of posts with irrelevant contents; the #hpv and #papillomavirus provided 50% and 64% of posts with informative content, respectively; and the #hpvvaccine provided 58% of posts with content related to primary prevention. The posts that received the highest number of likes were those from the hashtags #hpv and #papillomavirus with 151.33 and 78.00 likes/ post, respectively. The majority of posts presented less than 05 comments/post, except for the #hpv, which had 64.76 comments/post. According to the users' profiles, the majority of the posts, regardless of the hashtag used, were made by health professionals. Conclusion: The focus of Instagram posts about cervical cancer is on secondary prevention, which can contribute to the promotion of health behaviours not directed to aspects of primary prevention of the disease.

Online Provision of BRCA1 and BRCA2 Health Information: A Search Engine Driven Systematic Web-Based Analysis

“…Although we evaluated online website information provision, this is not the only source of information people interested in obtaining BRCA information could use. Several studies show the use of social media for health-related information, including communication on BRCA1 and BRCA2 on several platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter [45,49,57]. Other examples of sources are telephone helplines and physical leaflets.…”