Epidemiology from Tweets: Estimating Misuse of Prescription Opioids in the USA from Social Media.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The misuse of prescription opioids (MUPO) is a leading public health concern. Social media are playing an expanded role in public health research, but there are few methods for estimating established epidemiological metrics from social media. The purpose of this study was to demonstrate that the geographic variation of social media posts mentioning prescription opioid misuse strongly correlates with government estimates of MUPO in the last month.

Methods

We wrote software to acquire publicly available tweets from Twitter from 2012 to 2014 that contained at least one keyword related to prescription opioid use (n = 3,611,528). A medical toxicologist and emergency physician curated the list of keywords. We used the semantic distance (SemD) to automatically quantify t

SUBMITTER: Chary M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5711756 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature