Public sentiment analysis of Twitter reaction on sudden cardiac arrest at EURO 2020

Abstract

During the EURO 2020 football match between Denmark and Finland, the world witnessed the sudden cardiac arrest of Christian Dannemann Eriksen, a 29-year-old Danish renowned football player. He survived because of immediate basic life support and early defibrillation on the field, and was successfully discharged six days later from the hospital with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator. This letter includes an analysis of tweets in response to Eriksen’s sudden cardiac arrest, and provides timely content for basic life support courses1.Greif R. Lockey A. Breckwoldt J. et al.European Resuscitation Council Guidelines 2021: Education for resuscitation.Resuscitation. 2021; 161: 388-407Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (58) Google Scholar and mass public education.2.Semeraro F. Greif R. Böttiger B.W. et al.European Resuscitation Council Guidelines 2021: Systems saving lives.Resuscitation. 2021; 161: 80-97Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (74) Google Scholar Though witnessing a sudden cardiac arrest during an international football match is a rare event, this was not an isolated case. In 2012, Fabrice Muamba, an English football player, also survived a sudden cardiac arrest because of rapid cardiopulmonary resuscitation using an automated external defibrillator on the football pitch.3.Hammett E. How to save a life with CPR and an AED.BDJ Team. 2019; 6: 19037Crossref Google Scholar Tragically, not all sport-related sudden cardiac arrests end in survival of the victim.4.Mavrogeni S.I. Tsarouhas K. Spandidos D.A. Kanaka-Gantenbein C. Bacopoulou F. Sudden cardiac death in football players: Towards a new pre-participation algorithm.Experim Therap Med. 2019; 17: 1143-1148PubMed Google Scholar, 5.Egger F. Scharhag J. Kästner A. et al.FIFA Sudden Death Registry (FIFA-SDR): a prospective, observational study of sudden death in worldwide football from 2014 to 2018.Brit J Sports Med. 2020; : 1-8PubMed Google Scholar In response, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) launched a consensus statement “Sudden Death Registry” to document fatal events in football worldwide.6.Scharhag J. Bohm P. Dvorak J. Meyer T. F-MARC: the FIFA sudden death registry (FIFA-SDR).Brit J Sports Med Med. 2015; 49: 563-565Crossref PubMed Scopus (8) Google Scholar FIFA has initiated revised global standards for medical responses to prevent death after a sudden cardiac arrest on the field.7.Dvorak J. Kramer E.B. Schmied C.M. et al.The FIFA medical emergency bag and FIFA 11 steps to prevent sudden cardiac death: setting a global standard and promoting consistent football field emergency care.Brit J Sports Med. 2013; 47: 1199-1202Crossref PubMed Scopus (32) Google Scholar Using the academictwitteR package,8.Barrie C. Ho J. academictwitteR: an R package to access the Twitter Academic Research Product Track v2 API endpoint.J Open Source Softw. 2021; 6: 3272https://doi.org/10.21105/joss10.21105/joss.03272Crossref Google Scholar we created a database containing every tweet from 12 June 2021, 16:42 through the end of June 2021. The search string used was: “#Christianeriksen OR #christianericksen OR #christianeriksen OR #eriksenstrong OR #ericksen OR #eriksen OR #erikson”. Retweets, and non-English tweets were excluded. We used the Syuzhet package9.Jockers M. Introduction to the Syuzhet Package. (Accessed 9 June 2021, at: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/syuzhet/vignettes/syuzhet-vignette.html).Google Scholar for the analysis of sentiment in tweets text. The National Research Council Canada (NRC) Word-Emotion Association lexicon was used to analyze the tweets in eight emotions categories (trust, anticipation, joy, fear, surprise, sadness, anger, disgust)—it calculates a sentiment score for each emotion-tweet text using the aforementioned lexicon list of English words associated with emotions.10.Mohammad SM, Turney PD. NRC Emotion Lexicon. National Research Council Canada, 2013. (Accessed 9 June 2021, at: http://www.saifmohammad.com/WebDocs/NRCemotionlexicon.pdf).Google Scholar Tweets can include multiple emotions. The statistical analysis was performed using R (version 4.1.0, R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria). We included 45,034 tweets posted within 24 h of the event. The most commonly expressed sentiment was trust (47.3%, n = 21,280), followed by anticipation (45.1%, n = 20,314), joy (42.7%, n = 19,221), fear (32.0%, n = 14,417), surprise (24.1%, n = 10,833), sadness (18.0%, n = 8,109), anger (15.3%, n = 6,875), and disgust (12.7%, n = 5,712) (Fig. 1). The most frequently occurring words in tweets per emotion categories were hope, football, hospital, collapse, medical, team, fight, and time. In summary, there was an outpouring of public emotion in response to the sudden cardiac arrest of Christian Dannemann Eriksen during EURO 2020 that ranged from trust and anticipation to fear and anger. This event can be used as a case study to support the rationale for mass public education about responding to a sudden cardiac event with basic life support.2.Semeraro F. Greif R. Böttiger B.W. et al.European Resuscitation Council Guidelines 2021: Systems saving lives.Resuscitation. 2021; 161: 80-97Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (74) Google Scholar The sentiments expressed by the public through tweets provide insight into the wide range of emotions that spectators witnessing the event experience. These emotional should be factored into courses to support overcoming burdens and enhancing facilitators to engaging the public in learning basic life support.1.Greif R. Lockey A. Breckwoldt J. et al.European Resuscitation Council Guidelines 2021: Education for resuscitation.Resuscitation. 2021; 161: 388-407Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (58) Google Scholar