Outreach Through Facebook: Do Patients With Atopic Dermatitis Provide Clinically Relevant Information When Recruited for Surveys on Social Media? (Preprint)

Abstract

BACKGROUND Atopic Dermatitis (AD) is a widespread disease that affects up to 20% of the population in affluent countries. The disease and its impact have been studied on many surveys performed either through mail or telephone or on site in hospitals. These methods are however often laborious and costly. OBJECTIVE To investigate if outreach through social media can be used to recruit AD patients and if the data obtained are robust, clinically relevant and reflects what has been found in surveys so far. METHODS Patients with AD were invited to answer an online questionnaire on disease severity, treatment, and effect on daily quality of life. The participants were invited through the Facebook site of the Danish Atopic Dermatitis Patients Organization. RESULTS We found that when using Facebook for outreach there were significantly more female respondents than would be expected, the average age was lower than the average age in Denmark, and significantly more respondents than expected had an educational level of at least bachelor’s degree. Disease severity was skewed towards more severe AD than would be expected from general population studies, however the patients were also recruited through a patient organization. The use of proactive versus reactive treatment was also investigated, and patients with severe AD has longer use of reactive treatment and were more prone to use proactive treatment. CONCLUSIONS In this study we show that social media (Facebook) can be used for outreach to recruit AD respondents for surveys. Our results also show that data maybe are skewed towards females, young age, and high educated, which are those who use the social media for information finding of health-related issues. On the other, the survey was cheap and the results did reflect what we already know from other surveys and that clinical useful data can be obtained.