April 25, 2023
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Source/Disclosure
Issuer:
Disclosure:
One author reports receiving personal fees from AstraZeneca, HealthPals, Novartis, and Novo Nordisk. Other authors do not report relevant financial disclosures.
Important points:
- Researchers used AI to measure public perceptions of statins and cholesterol on social media.
- Most of the discussions on Reddit had neutral or negative sentiment towards statins, according to the analysis.
Over 10,000 discussions on Reddit, a large social media platform, showed mostly neutral sentiments toward statins, with a small but significant proportion of negative sentiments suggesting artificial indicated by analysis of intelligence.
Dr. Sulaiman Somani, M.D.a Stanford University medical resident, and colleagues utilize a semi-supervised natural language processing bidirectional encoder representation from the Transformers model to use thousands of statin-related posts and comments on Reddit to target statin therapy. Assessed public perception of. Researchers published their findings JAMA network open.
Researchers used AI to measure public perceptions of statins and cholesterol on social media.
Image: Adobe Stock
“Despite their well-established benefits and safety, statin use remains suboptimal in high-risk individuals with the clinical indications recommended by the guidelines. Understanding the reasons for underuse of statins is important for guiding public health and implementation efforts towards the prevention and treatment of ASCVD,” the researchers wrote. “Social media platforms have become a promising vehicle for understanding and gathering public opinion on health outside of the healthcare setting…Over the past few years, they have gained steady popularity for health-related purposes. One social media platform we have is Reddit, a discussion-based platform that allows users to post questions, comments and topics on a wide range of subjects, including statins.”
According to the 2023 Reddit Revenue and Usage Stats Report, Reddit has approximately 52 million daily active users and receives over 30 billion monthly views.
The researchers hypothesized that natural language processing AI could help gain insight into public perceptions of statins.
Statins Topics and Sentiments on Social Media
Between January 1, 2009 and July 12, 2022, AI identified 10,233 statin-related Reddit posts and comments containing the terms “statin” and “cholesterol.” This includes his 961 posts and his 9,272 comments from 5,188 unique authors.
Topics of discussion about statins were identified and grouped into one of six comprehensive thematic groups.
- ketogenic diet, diabetes, supplements, statins;
- side effects of statins;
- statin hesitation;
- evaluation of clinical trials;
- pharmaceutical industry biases and statins; and
- Red yeast rice and statins.
The name of the Reddit community is the “r/” prefix followed by the specified topic. The communities most frequently discussing statins were r/keto (23.1%), r/Cholesterol (21.3%), r/diabetes (8.6%) and r/science (6.9%).
Researchers reported an average annual increase of 32.9% in the number of statin-related discussions. The number of statin-related discussions within the r/Supplements, r/conspiracy, and r/diabetes communities is increasing year by year. However, the discussion has decreased in the r/Paleo and r/skeptic communities.
After sentiment analysis, Somani and colleagues observed that most discussions had neutral feelings (66.6%) regarding statins, while almost all the rest had negative feelings (30.8%).
Misinformation about health during the ‘infodemic’
“Sentiment analysis of social media posts and discussions about statins revealed predominantly neutral to negative sentiment. “There is a need for more aggressive public health efforts to monitor health-related misinformation on easily accessible social media platforms.
“[Misperceptions] Information posted on social media platforms can be a seed for the spread of misinformation,” they wrote. “For example, discussions on social media platforms used in this study are easily accessible because users do not need to have an account to view the content and are highly visible in search engines. Some individuals even use the platform as their default search engine.These factors lead to misleading susceptible cohorts, as reported in a study on the spread of misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prioritizing understanding this health misinformation and designing solutions for it in the age of the infodemic has recently become a major priority for the Surgeon General. It was highlighted as an issue and emphasized the importance of current research.”
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