‘Heart’ening tweets, a matter of research

“We were really interested in understanding more about how the public uses social media to discuss important topics,” said senior author Dr. Raina Merchant, of Penn Medicine Social Media and Health Innovation Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. She and her colleagues write in JAMA Cardiology that over 300 million people use Twitter to communicate with each other.

For the new study, they searched approximately 10 billion English-language Twitter posts in the US between July 2009 and February 2015 for messages about five cardiovascular and related diseases: high blood pressure, heart attack, cardiac arrest, heart failure and diabetes. The search terms included heart attack, coronary attack, diabetes, mellitus, heart arrest and heart failure. Overall, they found 550,338 tweets tied to cardiovascular disease. 

Of those, about 240,000 mentioned diabetes and about 270,000 mentioned myocardial infarction, the technical name for a heart attack. The researchers then did a deeper analysis of a subset of 2,500 tweets. They found tweets mostly discussed risk factors, followed by tweets meant to raise awareness and those discussing treatment and management of health conditions.