Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Sep 15, 2020
Date Accepted: Aug 12, 2021
Areas of Interest and Attitudes Towards Anti-Obesity Drugs: Thematic and Quantitative Analysis Using Twitter.
ABSTRACT
Background:
Twitter is an appropriate arena to assess the social consideration and attitudes towards anti-obesity drugs.
Objective:
To investigate the content and key metrics of tweets referring to anti-obesity drugs.
Methods:
In this observational quantitative and qualitative study, we focused on tweets containing hashtags related to anti-obesity drugs between September 20th and October 31st 2019. Tweets were first classified as to whether they described medical issues or not. Tweets with medical content were classified according to the topic they referred to: side effects, efficacy, or adherence. We additionally rated it as positive or negative. Furthermore, we classified any links included within a tweet as either scientific or non-scientific. Finally, the number of retweets generated as well as the dissemination and sentiment score obtained by the anti-obesity drugs analyzed were also measured.
Results:
We analyzed a total of 2,045 tweets, 945 of which were excluded according to the criteria of the study. Finally, 320 out of the 1,100 remaining tweets were also excluded because their content, although related to drugs for obesity treatment, did not address the efficacy and side effects of said medication, nor to adherence. Liraglutide and semaglutide accumulated the majority of tweets (87.4%). Notably, the content that generated the highest frequency of tweets was that related to treatment efficacy, with liraglutide, semaglutide and lorcaserin related tweets accumulating the highest proportion of positive consideration. We found the highest percentages of tweets with scientific links in those posts related to liraglutide and semaglutide. Semaglutide related tweets obtained the highest probability of likes and were the most disseminated within the Twitter community.
Conclusions:
Understanding the public view of these medications is necessary to design promotional strategies aimed at the appropriate population. Participation of researchers and health providers in related conversations and debates might create a collective opinion based on scientific data.
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