Year: 2019
Type: article
Abstract: A wareness of familial hypercholesterolemia (FH), a prevalent genetic disorder that greatly increases risk of early onset myocardial infarction, is low. 1 It is estimated that of the ≈1.3 million people with FH in the United States, <10% have been diagnosed.1 Twitter is being increasingly used in academic cardiovascular settings 2 ; however, its potential for promoting awareness of cardiovascular genetic disorders such as FH is unknown.September is designated as the National Cholesterol Education Month (NCEM) to promote awareness of hypercholesterolemia as a risk factor, including through social media.In addition, the International FH Awareness Day established by the FH Foundation as part of NCEM, includes a Tweet-a-thon.3 We investigated whether there was an increase in FH-related Twitter activity during NCEM in September 2018, using this as a surrogate for FH awareness.This study was deemed exempt by the institutional review board as it did not involve human or animal subjects.Publicly available Twitter data were used to support the findings of this report and are available from the corresponding author upon request.We quantified FH-related Twitter activity from August 2018 to October 2018 using Sprinklr Listening Explorer software to extract tweets and engagement metrics, including reach (the potential audience size of tweets, measured by total follower counts of users who shared content).As a control, we examined the reach of colorectal cancer-related tweets during the same period.FH-related tweets were classified as true positive or false positive based on a keyword list derived from manual review of tweets.This preprocessing step was performed by keyword matching using Python (script is publicly available and can be accessed at https://github.com/bastia1989/FHtweet).All true positive tweets were then categorized via name entity recognition of profile descriptions, to identify users as organizations or individuals.Tweets were also classified based on their message format as updates (mentions+original tweets+retweets with comments), retweets (without comments), and replies.A qualitative content analysis of a random sample of 600 tweets was performed, and topic-keyword tables were created to define 6 following thematic categories: awareness/prevention, diagnosis, treatment, lifestyle, knowledge dissemination, and conferences/fundraisers. Tweets were then binned into these categories based on presence of relevant keywords.During NCEM in September, FH-related tweets increased by 152.9% compared with August and then declined by 58.8% in October.The topic reach for FH was 11.1 million in August and increased by 250.6% in September to 37.7 million.The reach declined by 71.9% in October to 10.6 million.In comparison, the reach for colorectal cancer declined from 453.1 million in August to 300.5 million in September and then increased by 120.9% to 677.0 million in October, which happens to be Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
Institution: Mayo Clinic
Language: English
Subfield: Health
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2960913341