Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Mar 12, 2024
Date Accepted: Sep 10, 2024
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Tracking the spread of Pollen in social media: A retrospective analysis of pollen messages from Twitter
ABSTRACT
Background:
Allergy disorders caused by biological particles as proteins of some airborne pollen grains are currently considered one of the most common chronic diseases and European Academy of Allergy & Clinical Immunology forecasts indicate that within 15 years 50% of Europeans will suffer from some kind of allergy as a consequence of urbanization, industrialization, pollution and climate change.
Objective:
This study sought to apply social media information to track the spread of messages related to pollen symptomatology as a tool to take preventive measures to mitigate the impact of pollen on sensitive patients.
Methods:
Utilizing a blend of Large Language Models, dimensionality reduction, unsupervised clustering, and TF-IDF, alongside visual representations like word clouds and semantic interaction graphs, our study analyzed Twitter data to uncover insights on respiratory allergies. This concise methodology enabled the extraction of significant themes and patterns, offering a deep dive into public knowledge and discussions surrounding respiratory allergies on Twitter.
Results:
The months between March and August have the highest volume of messages. The percentage of patient tweets appears to have increased notably during the last years as well as a potential increase in the prevalence of symptoms, mainly in the morning hours, indicating a potential rise in pollen allergies and related discussions on social media. Whilst pollen allergy is a global issue, specific sociocultural, political and economic contexts mean patients experience symptomatology at a localised level, needing appropriate localised responses.
Conclusions:
The interpretation of social media tweets information represents a valuable tool to take preventive measures to mitigate the impact of pollen allergy on sensitive patients to achieve equity in living conditions and enhance access to health information and services.
Citation
