Twitter posts reveal public health trends

Computer scientists Mark Dredze and Michael Paul at John Hopkins University found Twitter to be fast emerging as a potentially valuable means to provide public healthcare information and medical alerts.

Dr Dredze said, "Our goal was to find out whether Twitter posts could be a useful source of public health information. We determined that indeed, they could.

"In some cases, we probably learned some things that even the tweeters' doctors were not aware of, like which over-the-counter medicines the posters were using to treat their symptoms at home."

The study found useful information pertaining to personal medical problems, perceptions on popular health topics, and common remedies.

Health related data sifted and categorized
In order to determine whether Twitter could produce valuable data pertaining to public health, researchers examined 1.5 million health related tweets between May 2009 and October 2010.

They devised a special system that helped them categorize and sift everything from allergies and flu to other illnesses and ailments such as cancer, obesity and depression, and disregard the words and phrases used in billions of Twitter posts that were unrelated to health.

Dredze said, "There have been some narrow studies using Twitter posts, for example, to track flu outbreaks. But to our knowledge, no one has ever used tweets to look at as many health issues as we did."

Study findings
The investigators were able to zero down to around 200,000 relevant tweets. Through these, they were able to track certain health trends like when allergy and flu seasons hit different parts of the country.

Dredze stated, "We were able to see from the tweets that the allergy season started earlier in the warmer states and later in the Midwest and the Northeast.”

The study found useful information pertaining to personal medical problems, perceptions on popular health topics, and common remedies.

Other information garnered from some tweets was the misuse of medication. The duo found people taking antibiotics as a cure for the flu, which is a misguided concept because they don’t work and could be a potential public-health issue.

The study found two kinds of allergies persist, one that causes sniffling and sneezing while the other causes skin to rashes and hives to erupt.

Michael Paul added, "We found that some people tweeted that they were taking antibiotics for flu. But antibiotics don't work on the flu, which is a virus, and this practice could contribute to the growing antibiotic resistance problems.

"So these tweets showed us that some serious medical misperceptions exist out there.

"When we started, I didn't even know if people talked about allergies on Twitter. But we found out that they do.”

Some limitations
Though the study found that social media has obvious advantages for tracking disease outbreaks, public health trends or disseminating healthcare information, researchers said the study has some limitations.

According to the duo, since Twitter users comprise of the younger segment, data related about senior-citizen health wasn’t well documented.

Moreover, it was noted that people are inclined to tweet on symptoms only once which makes it difficult to determine types of ailments and how long they lasted.

Paul stated, "In our study we could only learn what people were willing to share. We think there's a limit to what people are willing to share on Twitter."

The results will be presented at the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence on July 18 in Barcelona.