The Literacy Demand of Cancer &amp; COVID-19 Consumer Health Information

Papadakos, Janet; Reznikov, Violetta; Giannopoulos, Eleni; Giuliani, Meredith; Papadakos, Tina

doi:10.1080/15398285.2020.1858258

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…The plethora of contradictory information available on the pandemic makes it challenging for patients to evaluate sources and subsequently assess risk accurately. 35 Participants cited difficulty with assessing the quality of entire media (eg, television stations and journal articles) because the quality within each type of media could vary considerably. Use of social media, however, indicated greater worry among participants, and this may point to the availability of misinformation online.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The analysis indicates the importance of language proficiency, education, and information sources in shaping patient attitudes toward the pandemic. The plethora of contradictory information available on the pandemic makes it challenging for patients to evaluate sources and subsequently assess risk accurately 35 . Participants cited difficulty with assessing the quality of entire media (eg, television stations and journal articles) because the quality within each type of media could vary considerably.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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COVID‐19 and patients with cancer: Investigating treatment impact, information sources, and COVID‐19–related knowledge, attitudes, and practices

Ugas

Samoil

Avery

et al. 2021

Cancer

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BACKGROUND:The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has caused enormous strain on public health. Patients with cancer are particularly susceptible to the disease, and their treatment plans have been threatened by public health restrictions designed to contain the spread. METHODS: This study examined the effects of the pandemic on cancer patients' psychology, knowledge, attitudes, and practices concerning COVID-19 as well as their perceptions of the impact of COVID-19 on their cancer health care services. A survey was sent to 5800 patients at a cancer center in Toronto, Canada. Descriptive results were summarized. Qualitative feedback was coded and summarized. To examine for potential associations, regression models were tested for the outcomes of patient psychological well-being, knowledge, attitudes, and practices, and they accounted for several demographic, health literacy, and disease variables. RESULTS: A total of 1631 surveys were completed. Most patients saw their appointments shifted to virtual visits, and for a substantial minority, there was no change. A majority of the patients (62%) expressed fears about contracting the virus. There were no independent predictors of COVID-19-related knowledge. Fears were more pronounced among patients who did not speak English and those who used social media more often. Female participants, those who scored higher on knowledge questions, and those who used cancer center materials were more likely to take preventative measures against infection. CONCLUSIONS: This study provides a snapshot of the state of cancer patient treatment and the knowledge, attitudes, and practices of patients between the first 2 waves of the pandemic. The study's results can inform our understanding of adaptation to conditions during and after the outbreak.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

COVID‐19 and patients with cancer: Investigating treatment impact, information sources, and COVID‐19–related knowledge, attitudes, and practices

Ugas

Samoil

Avery

et al. 2021

Cancer

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“…The lack of responses among those participants may point to confusion on their part. Scholars have pointed to the existence of a “misinfodemic” following the emergence of COVID-19, which has been compounded by the fact that factual information is inaccessible for much of the public [ 30 ]. The information that is available may be oversimplified and severely lacking in nuance [ 31 ].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

COVID-19 and Cancer Patients in the Second Year of the Pandemic: Investigating Treatment Impact, Information Sources, and COVID-19-Related Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices

et al. 2022

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Background: The novel coronavirus that has triggered the present COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread globally, resulting in widespread morbidity and mortality. Patients with cancer remain one of the most vulnerable subsets of the population to the disease. This study examined the effects of the pandemic on cancer patients’ treatment, psychology, knowledge, attitudes, and practices. Methods: A survey was emailed to 9861 patients at a cancer centre in Toronto, Canada. Descriptive results were summarized. Qualitative feedback was coded and summarized. Regression modelling was used to explore factors associated with patient psychological well-being, knowledge, attitudes, and practices. Results: A total of 1760 surveys were completed, with a response rate of 17.8%. Most participants did not experience any pandemic-related treatment delays, and vaccination rates were high. Participants who identified themselves as non-white (OR 3.30, CI: 1.30–5.30; p ≤ 0.001), and those who referred to journal articles for information (p = 0.002) reported higher psychological impact scores. There were no significant predictors of whether participants would use personal protective equipment when leaving their homes or whether they would go to crowded places. Discussion: This study provides another snapshot of cancer patients perceptions and needs during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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“…However, this medical jargon is obscure to laymen and may require patients to ask for more details to be sure that they understand their condition and treatment plans ( Josh, 2017 ). A recent study ( Papadakos et al, 2021 ) showed the effect of health literacy on the accuracy of the information laymen are seeking related to coronavirus (COVID-19) and cancer. The study concluded that much of the cancer and COVID-19 information available does match with patients’ health literacy because much of the present information has been written using professional terminology which is hard for laymen to understand.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An automated method to enrich consumer health vocabularies using GloVe word embeddings and an auxiliary lexical resource

Ibrahim¹,

Gauch²,

Salman³

et al. 2021

PeerJ Computer Science

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Background Clear language makes communication easier between any two parties. A layman may have difficulty communicating with a professional due to not understanding the specialized terms common to the domain. In healthcare, it is rare to find a layman knowledgeable in medical terminology which can lead to poor understanding of their condition and/or treatment. To bridge this gap, several professional vocabularies and ontologies have been created to map laymen medical terms to professional medical terms and vice versa. Objective Many of the presented vocabularies are built manually or semi-automatically requiring large investments of time and human effort and consequently the slow growth of these vocabularies. In this paper, we present an automatic method to enrich laymen’s vocabularies that has the benefit of being able to be applied to vocabularies in any domain. Methods Our entirely automatic approach uses machine learning, specifically Global Vectors for Word Embeddings (GloVe), on a corpus collected from a social media healthcare platform to extend and enhance consumer health vocabularies. Our approach further improves the consumer health vocabularies by incorporating synonyms and hyponyms from the WordNet ontology. The basic GloVe and our novel algorithms incorporating WordNet were evaluated using two laymen datasets from the National Library of Medicine (NLM), Open-Access Consumer Health Vocabulary (OAC CHV) and MedlinePlus Healthcare Vocabulary. Results The results show that GloVe was able to find new laymen terms with an F-score of 48.44%. Furthermore, our enhanced GloVe approach outperformed basic GloVe with an average F-score of 61%, a relative improvement of 25%. Furthermore, the enhanced GloVe showed a statistical significance over the two ground truth datasets with P < 0.001. Conclusions This paper presents an automatic approach to enrich consumer health vocabularies using the GloVe word embeddings and an auxiliary lexical source, WordNet. Our approach was evaluated used healthcare text downloaded from MedHelp.org, a healthcare social media platform using two standard laymen vocabularies, OAC CHV, and MedlinePlus. We used the WordNet ontology to expand the healthcare corpus by including synonyms, hyponyms, and hypernyms for each layman term occurrence in the corpus. Given a seed term selected from a concept in the ontology, we measured our algorithms’ ability to automatically extract synonyms for those terms that appeared in the ground truth concept. We found that enhanced GloVe outperformed GloVe with a relative improvement of 25% in the F-score.

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The Literacy Demand of Cancer & COVID-19 Consumer Health Information

Cited by 5 publications

References 15 publications

COVID‐19 and patients with cancer: Investigating treatment impact, information sources, and COVID‐19–related knowledge, attitudes, and practices

COVID‐19 and patients with cancer: Investigating treatment impact, information sources, and COVID‐19–related knowledge, attitudes, and practices

COVID-19 and Cancer Patients in the Second Year of the Pandemic: Investigating Treatment Impact, Information Sources, and COVID-19-Related Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices

An automated method to enrich consumer health vocabularies using GloVe word embeddings and an auxiliary lexical resource

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