JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Even though chemotherapy has been first introduced for cancer treatment more than 60 years ago, the public understanding and acceptance of it might be in doubt.

Objective:

This study aimed to assess the public perception and misconceptions that have been shared on Twitter regarding chemotherapy as a cancer treatment.

Methods:

All tweets containing any of the representative set keywords and written between 1st of May to 31st of October 2017 were retrieved. A manual content analysis to identify categories of users, general themes of tweets and the common misconceptions was carried out. A chi-square test for independence with adjusted residuals was used to assess for significant associations between the categories of users and themes of the tweets.

Results:

A total of 402,157 tweets were retrieved. Out of that, we excluded 309,602 retweets, and 62,651 irrelevant tweets. Therefore, 29,904 tweets were included in the final analysis. ‘General users’ were the majority (86.2%) followed by ‘cancer patients’ relatives and friends’ (6.4%). Tweets fell into nine themes where ‘prayers and wishes’ was the most common theme (67.8%), followed by ‘misconceptions’ (7%). There was a highly significant association between the category of user and the themes of tweets (X2 (40) = 16904.45, P-value <0.0001).

Conclusions:

Our findings add to previous studies that showed Twitter as a valuable opportunity to assess public perception and misconceptions about various health-related topics. Most of the tweets in our sample delivered supportive messages for the patients undergoing chemotherapy which suggests a possible role for the Twitter as a support mechanism for those patients. Misconceptions were also the second most prevalent theme. Our exploratory analysis should help physicians and organizations tailor future educational efforts to address these areas of misconception.