Sharing the pain: an observational analysis of Twitter and pain in Ireland

Abstract

IntroductionStudies involving Twitter and chronic pain can provide highly valuable patient-generated information. The aim of this paper was to examine pain-related tweets in Ireland over a 2-week period from 22 June 2017 to 5 July 2017 using pain-related keywords. We wished to identify Twitter user gender profile; most common discussion topics; sentiment analysis; and dissemination of tweets.MethodsA third-party data analytics company conducted a Twitter social media analysis over a randomly chosen 14-day period between the dates 22 June and 5 July 2017. All relevant keywords were included in the search. Author group consensus yielded 24 terms. Geographical location was restricted to Ireland. A computational sentiment dictionary was used to provide a rating of the emotional properties of the text on a 9-point scale from −5 to +4 of negative to positive sentiment. Dissemination was calculated by the number of times the tweet was displayed (‘impressions’).ResultsThere were 941 tweets identified during the study from 715 contributors. These generated 2.88 million impressions. The most frequently occurring keywords were headache (n=321); migraine (n=147); back pain (n=123); cannabis (n=114); and chronic pain (n=85). There were 1.94 times as many tweets from females as males. The highest proportion of tweets from female users was in the fibromyalgia (83%) and migraine (60%) categories; and from males in the sciatica (35%), chronic pain (34%) and back pain (32%) categories. Cannabis-related tweets reflected mostly non-personal content (90%), with a highly positive sentiment, and the highest number of impressions per tweet. The largest amount of advice was offered in the back pain category. Reposting of other users’ content (‘retweets’) was more likely to contain a positive sentiment.ConclusionA substantial discussion of pain-related topics took place on Twitter during our study period. This provided real-time, dynamic information from individuals on discussion topics in pain medicine. This can be used to gain a greater understanding of the pain experience. As patients are increasingly acquiring healthcare information through online sources, high-quality information from approved sources should be promoted on such platforms.

How advocacy affects Twitter migraine conversations: A pilot cross-sectional survey of Northeast American “migraine” landscape on Twitter from May to June 2020

“…9 4) Mullins et al have studied topics and keywords in a randomly chosen 14-day periods in 2017 in Ireland. 10 5) Finally, in a survey of 20,301 tweets from September 30, 2019 to January 14, 2020 we showed that topics of “#CBD,” “#cannabis,” as well as “#chronicillness,” “#chronic pain” and “#spoonie” were some of the most commonly tweeted hashtags. 11…”

“…Alternative medicine and health strategies such as #yoga is present in May and #acupuncture, #chiropractic is present in June. Advocacy topics such as #mham (Rank 2), #mham2020 (Rank 4), #shadesformigraine (Rank 5), #cmaware (rank7), #rallyagainstchronicmigraine (13), #migraineawareness (10) are the most commonly hashtags presented in June; #cmaware, #mham, #rallyagainstchronicmigraine, #migraineawareness were ranked at 3, 6, 12, 19, respectively in May.…”

“…9 4) Mullins et al have studied topics and keywords in a randomly chosen 14-day periods in 2017 in Ireland. 10 5) Finally, in a survey of 20,301 tweets from September 30, 2019 to January 14, 2020 we showed that topics of "#CBD," "#cannabis," as well as "#chronicillness," "#chronic pain" and "#spoonie" were some of the most commonly tweeted hashtags. 11 Our study takes a different methodological approach from most of the above studies: Utilizing hashtag, a builtin user topic classification system, we use network analysis to analyze migraine conversations.…”

“…A handful of prior studies have been done on migraine discussions on Twitter. [7][8][9][10] However, we are only aware of one prior study on network analysis of migraine hashtags by the author. 11 This project is an improvement on this prior endeavor.…”

New in understanding the burden of migraine: semantic analysis of the voice of Russian patients – users of Web 2.0

“…Mullins и соавт. [11] провели анализ социальной сети Twitter и включили в поиск несколько релевантных ключевых слов по проблеме боли. Только в течение 14-дневного периода был обнаружен 941 твит от 715 авторов.…”