Abstract P175: A Twitter Analysis Of Hypertension And Allergies: Discordance Between Social Media Discussion And Disease Morbidity

Abstract

Background: Social media data may be used to shed light on how engaged the general public is in conversations surrounding elevated blood pressure (BP) as an important health problem. Methods: We gathered Twitter data from 1/1/2016 to 11/23/2019 using the ‘TweetScraper’ program (https://github.com/jonbakerfish/TweetScraper). We scraped tweets with content related to BP and, to generate comparator data, we similarly collected tweets related to allergies during the same time period. We then plotted the number of tweets over time (in days) for each health topic and compared the between-group frequency of tweets over time. Results: We observed that the frequency of tweets related to BP was consistently lower than that related to allergy, notwithstanding lower rates of allergy related tweets during the non-peak allergy seasons ( Figure ). The number of tweets related to BP never exceeded those related to allergy, per month, but there were single day anomalies: BP tweets exceeded allergy tweets by 78% on 11/13/2017 and by 96% on 11/14/2027, following the release of updated hypertension guidelines. Conclusions: We demonstrate both the feasibility and utility of using social media data to assess the general public’s interest level in certain health topics over time. We found persistently lower levels of engagement around elevated BP (asymptomatic but conferring high mortality risk) compared to allergies (symptomatic but conferring low mortality risk) despite their similarly wide prevalence. As popular social media methods of communication evolve, so will the challenges and opportunities related to harnessing these data as part of efforts to improve public health.