Searching Online For Health Information Research Articles

Abstract P6-16-06: Twitter chats: Utilizing an innovative technology platform to offer education and tools to people with breast cancer

Abstract Background. The use of social media for health information and peer support has grown significantly over time. According a 2015 study from the Pew Research Center, 65 percent of U.S. adults utilize social media, up from 7 percent a decade earlier. A 2014 study reported 72 percent of adult internet users search online for health information, often focused on specific diseases or treatments, with 16 percent seeking others with similar health concerns. Twitter, a popular social media platform for information- and support-seekers, grew from 54 million monthly active users in 2010 to approximately 241 million in 2013. To address the growing use of Twitter as an information and support portal, Living Beyond Breast Cancer (LBBC) decided to pilot a Twitter chat in 2014. The goals for the chat were to: (1) increase understanding of a breast cancer concern; (2) connect impacted individuals to one another in a supportive and safe online space; (3) offer practical resources for further exploration; and (4) increase LBBC's reach online among users interested in breast cancer. Methods. LBBC staff researched best practices for Twitter chats. The topic of triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) was chosen for LBBC's pilot program to coincide with Triple Negative Breast Cancer Awareness Day. The staff developed 7 questions and 10 alternates to deliver over 60 minutes. Using publicly available data from Symplur, hashtags were considered and developed. A panel was recruited of one medical oncologist, two advocates, and two women with TNBC. Panelists were encouraged to prepare Tweets in advance and, during the chat, to use assigned hashtags, correct medical inaccuracies, and attend to emotional concerns among chat participants. LBBC staff developed resource-rich tweets. The program was promoted over social media channels. At the end of the chat, participants were offered an incentivized opportunity to evaluate the program via a URL link to LBBC's existing survey instrument. Results. Using the #TNBCchat hashtag, the March 3, 2014, program and activity the next week produced 234 tweets from 127 contributors, reaching 198,985 accounts. Participants wrote 118 tweet replies and retweeted 291 comments. Questions covered the definition of and treatments for TNBC, differences between metastatic and early-stage disease, unique emotional concerns, and methods to reduce recurrence risk. The three most popular tweets promoted the program, introduced panelists, and shared resources about PARP inhibitors. Encouraged by the pilot program's reach and results, LBBC has delivered 20 Twitter chats as of June 2018. Topics have included nutrition, parenting, caregiving, and breast reconstruction. Over time, LBBC staff has refined the program model with the goals of increasing engagement, delivering more useful content, and driving users toward the evaluation. Conclusions. Twitter chats allow nonprofit organizations to inexpensively utilize innovative technology to provide educational information to and foster a community of support among people impacted by breast cancer. By utilizing core organizational principles of appropriate program delivery, LBBC delivers practical content that may improve the quality of life of users in distant locations. Citation Format: Guglielmino JE, Ormerod CL, Grillo AB, Sood SA. Twitter chats: Utilizing an innovative technology platform to offer education and tools to people with breast cancer [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 2018 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium; 2018 Dec 4-8; San Antonio, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2019;79(4 Suppl):Abstract nr P6-16-06.

Sexual health in your hands: How the smartphone apps can improve your sexual wellbeing?

Summary In recent years, the numbers of smartphone users has surged across the world and downloads of smartphone apps have grown significantly, with smartphone usage increased to 73% among American adolescents since 2013. The main goal of this article is to present a review of the literature focusing the use of smartphone applications to improve sexual health. Using a smartphone application to provide sexual health information, especially to younger populations, might aid in increasing awareness of sexual risk behaviors before sexual debut. Providing accurate, comprehensive, and up-to-date sexual health education materials through smartphones vs websites might improve their sexual health outcomes. However, there are few smartphone applications related to sexual and reproductive health that are available to users. Research has shown that 80% of Internet users in the United States search online for health information, and that young people are gathering health information using mobile devices with increasing frequency, including sexual health information. However, while new technologies, including smartphone apps, are used to facilitate health information seeking, health-related apps are infrequently downloaded and rarely used. This suggests that, to promote sexual health through smartphone apps, researchers could partner with app developers in order to integrate sexual health promotion interventions in popular sex-related or dating apps. However, it is evident that these apps provide novel opportunities to engage at-risk populations in sexual health interventions. Several studies have suggested that young adults consider sexual health promotion via apps acceptable. Future research should focus on evaluating these efforts specifically in the reduction of negative sexual health consequences such as a decrease of STIs and unintended pregnancies as well as whether a sexual health app can link clients to health services. Our results could help clinicians by offering information about the potential use of smartphone apps to increase sexual health.

Evaluation of internet-based patient education materials from internal medicine subspecialty organizations: will patients understand them?

The majority of Americans use the Internet daily, if not more often, and many search online for health information to better understand a diagnosis they have been given or to research treatment options. The average American reads at an eighth-grade level. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the readability of online patient education materials on the websites of 14 professional organizations representing the major internal medicine subspecialties. We used ten well-established quantitative readability scales to assess written text from patient education materials published on the websites of the major professional organizations representing the following subspecialty groups: allergy and immunology, cardiology, endocrinology, gastroenterology, geriatrics, hematology, hospice and palliative care, infectious disease, nephrology, oncology, pulmonology and critical care, rheumatology, sleep medicine, and sports medicine. Collectively the 540 articles analyzed were written at an 11th-grade level (SD 1.4 grade levels). The sleep medicine and nephrology websites had the most readable materials, written at an academic grade level of 8.5±1.5 and 9.0±0.2, respectively. Material at the infectious disease site was written at the most difficult level, with average readability corresponding to grades 13.9±0.3. None of the patient education materials we reviewed conformed to the American Medical Association (AMA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) guidelines requiring that patient education articles be written at a third- to seventh-grade reading level. If these online resources were rewritten, it is likely that more patients would derive benefit from reading them.

The curious case of cyberchondria: A longitudinal study on the reciprocal relationship between health anxiety and online health information seeking

The current study is the first to longitudinally investigate the reciprocal relationship between online health information seeking and health anxiety, i.e., cyberchondria. Expectations were that health anxious individuals who go online to find health information, experience an increase in health anxiety, which in turn will reinforce online seeking. A 4-wave longitudinal survey study among 5322 respondents aged 16–93 was conducted. Our results showed that individuals who are more health anxious than others, search online for health information more. Moreover, the results provided initial evidence for the expected reciprocal relationship between health anxiety and online health information seeking in respondents with non-clinical levels of health anxiety at the start of the study. However, this reciprocal relationship could not be found in a subsample of clinically health anxious individuals. Although for these individuals online health information seeking did not seem to exacerbate health anxiety levels, it might still serve as a maintaining factor of clinical health anxiety.

All About Asthma: Top Resources for Children, Adolescents, and Their Families

All About Asthma: Top Resources for Children, Adolescents, and Their Families

Online Health-Searching Behavior Among HIV-Seropositive and HIV-Seronegative Men Who Have Sex With Men in the Baltimore and Washington, DC Area

BackgroundSearching online for health information is common among American adults. However, there have been few studies to investigate the online health-searching behaviors among men who have sex with men (MSM) with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).ObjectiveTo estimate the prevalence of Internet use among HIV-seropositive MSM and compare their online behaviors with HIV-seronegative men with chronic disease(s).MethodsThis study was performed at the Baltimore/Washington, DC site of the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study (MACS). A total of 200 MACS participants were asked to answer a self-administered questionnaire on a first-come basis during a semiannual study visit (from July to November 2011); 195 (97.5%) participants completed the survey. Multiple logistic regression models were used to investigate the factors influencing their online health-searching behaviors.ResultsThe median age of the 195 MSM participants was 57 years, 64.6% were white, 59.0% were employed, and 88.2% had Internet access at home and/or other locations. Of the 95 HIV-seropositive participants, 89.5% currently used highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) and 82.1% had Internet access. After adjusting for age and race/ethnicity, the HIV-seropositive participants were less likely to perform online searches for general disease-related information compared to the HIV-seronegative men with chronic disease(s) (OR 0.20, 95% CI 0.06-0.68, P=.01). There were no statistically significant associations with HIV status and searching for new medications/treatments (OR 0.55, 95% CI 0.19-1.55, P=.26) or support/advice from other patients (OR 0.52, 95% CI 0.18-1.53, P=.24). Increasing age by 5 years led to a decrease by 29% in the odds of online health-related searches for general information (OR 0.71, 95% CI 0.52-0.98, P=.03) and 26% for support/advice from other patients (OR 0.74, 95% CI 0.56-0.98, P=.03). A decrease of 25% for new medications/treatments was also seen, but was not statistically significant (OR 0.75, 95% CI 0.57-1.01, P=.06).ConclusionsThis study shows that HIV-seropositive MSM have similar online health-searching behaviors as HIV-seronegative men with chronic disease(s). Independent of HIV status, older MSM are less likely to perform online health-related searches.

“Flying blind” without epilepsy surveillance data

In this issue of Neurology ®, Dale Hesdorffer and colleagues1 report the risk of developing epilepsy, while accounting for the competing risk of mortality, using population-based data from Rochester, Minnesota. These authors should be commended for their sophisticated analysis, which is an important contribution to the epilepsy epidemiology research literature. But a careful look at their data reveals that their analysis is of people whose epilepsy was diagnosed 31–50 years ago. Timely, good-quality population-based data that met their research needs were not available. The authors did the best analysis possible with the data available, but these data from a long-past era of epilepsy classification, diagnosis, and care may not reflect the current reality of neurology practice. This minor imperfection of their epidemiologic analysis is a manifestation of a much greater problem with far more important consequences— the almost absent epilepsy surveillance infrastructure in the United States. Watch the evening news, listen to the radio, or search online for health information, and you will find news coverage of the latest surveillance report, often from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Increasing drug-resistant tuberculosis is a serious threat, breast cancer among African American women is often diagnosed too …

Search Your Way to an Accurate Diagnosis: Predictors of Internet-Based Diagnosis Accuracy

Many people search online for health information and make self-diagnoses. However, little is known about factors affecting whether a person is able to make an accurate Internet-based diagnosis. An online survey (N = 209) was conducted to explore the predictors of Internet-based diagnosis accuracy. A multiple regression analysis showed that approximately 22% of the variance of diagnosis accuracy was accounted for by the linear combination of health-information orientation, eHealth literacy, prior knowledge, and Internet search time. However, only prior knowledge and search time were significant predictors of diagnosis accuracy, with prior knowledge positively and search time negatively related to diagnosis accuracy. A paired t test indicated that participants' diagnosis accuracy increased after the Internet search. This study implies that simply searching all over the Internet for a long time may not produce accurate diagnoses. Online health searches can be beneficial supplements, but they should not replace the expertise of a physician.