Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Feb 24, 2022
Date Accepted: Sep 27, 2022
Discussions of Antibiotic Resistance on Social Media Platforms: Text Mining and Mixed Methods Content Analysis Study
Background:
With the increasing popularity of Web 2.0 applications, social media has made it possible for individuals to post messages on antibiotic ineffectiveness. In such online conversations, patients discuss their quality of life. Social media have become key tools for finding and disseminating medical information
Objective:
To identify the main themes of discussion, the difficulties encountered by patients with respect to antibiotic ineffectiveness and the impact on their quality of life (physical, psychological, social, or financial).
Methods:
A noninterventional retrospective study was carried out by collecting social media posts in French language written by internet users mentioning their experience with antibiotics, and the impact of their ineffectiveness on their quality of life. Messages posted between January 2014 and July 2020 were extracted from French-speaking publicly available online forums.
Results:
A total of 3 773 messages were included in the analysis corpus after extraction and filtering. These messages were posted by 2 335 individual web users, most of them being women around 35 years of age. Inefficacy of treatment options and the lack of information regarding the use of antibiotics were among the most discussed topics. Quality of life was discussed in 63% of the 3 773 messages posted. The most common is the physical impact (78%). Patients discussed the persistence of symptoms and side effects. The second kind of impact is psychological (65%), characterized by feelings of anxiety or despair about the situation.
Conclusions:
This social media analysis allowed us to identify a strong impact of the perceived ineffectiveness of antibiotic therapy on patients’ daily life particularly in terms of physical and psychological consequences. These results provide healthcare experts information directly generated by patients regarding their own experiences. Social media studies constitute a complementary source of evidence that could be used to optimize messages to the public about appropriate use of antibiotics.
ClinicalTrial:
Not applicable (not a trial)
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.