Abstract 1345P
Background
In the last few years, the presence of Oncology in social media has grown enormously. Previous studies have demonstrated that breast cancer patients use Twitter as a platform for sharing experiences and looking for information. In this analysis, we aimed to compare the presence of immunotherapy (IT) and chemotherapy (ChT) in this social media.
Methods
We performed a quantitative and qualitative observational study. We selected tweets in Spanish or English, posted during a 1-year period between March 2019 and March 2020 (before the SASR-CoV2 pandemic) that included hashtags related to ChT and IT. We classified the tweets according to type of user and content (health related (HR) and non-health related (NHR)). Tweets were subsequently sub-classified in different pre-defined categories. For comparisons, we used T-test for quantitative variables and Chi-square test for qualitative traits. Two-sided P values below 0.05 were deemed statistically significant.
Results
During the pre-specified 1-year period we collected a total of 97,228 tweets. For the analysis we randomly selected 5870 tweets (2990 IT and 2880 ChT tweets). We found a significant different proportion of HR tweets between ChT and IT groups (61% vs 39% p<0.001). Journal profiles were the most common users in the IT group (90%); and patients’ relatives in the ChT group (99%). Specifically for HR tweets, treatment-derived side effects were present in 75% of IT tweets in contrast with 25% of ChT tweets. When we analyzed the adequacy of the medical content, we found a significant different proportion in favour of IT group (61% vs 39%, p=0.001). In the NHR tweets, economic issues, personal opinions and doubts about treatment were more frequent in the ChT group (p>0.001).
Conclusions
In this real-world exploratory analysis comparing IT vs ChT in Twitter, health related issues were more commonly mentioned in IT tweets, whereas a higher proportion of non-health related content was present in the ChT group. The results of this study may be useful in assisting advocacy organizations to provide information about resources and patients’ support.
Clinical trial identification
Editorial acknowledgement
Legal entity responsible for the study
The authors.
Funding
Has not received any funding.
Disclosure
All authors have declared no conflicts of interest.