JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Twitter has become a popular platform for individuals to broadcast their daily experience and opinions on a wide range of topics and emotions. Tweets from cancer patients could offer insights into the needs of cancer patients. Although large amounts of health-related data are posted on Twitter each day, research using these data to understand cancer patients is limited.

Objective:

This study aimed to uncover the potential of using Twitter data to understand perspectives and experiences of thyroid cancers at a global level.

Methods:

This retrospective descriptive study collected tweets relevant to thyroid cancer in the year 2020. Both tweets and Twitter users were manually classified into different groups based on the content. Each tweet was subjected to sentiment analysis and classified as either positive, neutral, or negative.

Results:

A total of 13,135 tweets related to thyroid cancer were included in the analysis. The authors of the tweets were thyroid cancer patients (24.6%), patient’s families and friends (18.6%), medical journals and media (13.2%), health care professionals (8.3%), and medical health organizations (7.2%), respectively. Most conversations that connected to thyroid cancer were related to living with cancer (27.8%), treatment (22.0%), diagnosis (12.3%), risk factors and prevention (8.7%), and research (7.3%). From the sentiment analysis, 53.5% were classified as neutral statements and 32.7% were categorized as negative emotions. Tweets from thyroid cancer patients had the highest proportion of negative emotion (42.9%).

Conclusions:

This study provides new insights on using Twitter data as a valuable data source to understand thyroid cancer patients’ experiences. Twitter may provide an opportunity to improve patient and physician engagement or apply as a potential research data source.