Nov 20 (Reuters) - Amid snarky comments and links to cat
videos, some Twitter users turn to the social network to find
and post information on health issues like cardiac arrest and
CPR, according to a U.S. study.
Over a month, researchers found 15,234 messages on Twitter
that included specific information about resuscitation and
cardiac arrest, said the study published in the journal
Resuscitation.
"From a science standpoint, we wanted to know if we can
reliably find information on a public health topic, or is
(Twitter) just a place where people describe what they ate that
day," said Raina Merchant, the study's lead author and a
professor at the Department of Emergency Medicine at the
University of Pennsylvania.
According to the researchers, they found people using
Twitter to send and receive a wide variety of information on CPR
and cardiac arrest, including their personal experiences,
questions and current events.
Some researchers and organizations already use Twitter for
public health matters, including tracking the 2009 H1N1 "swine
flu" pandemic and finding the source of the Haitian cholera
outbreak, the researchers said.
For the study, the researchers created a Twitter search for
key terms, such as CPR, AED (automatic external defibrillators),
resuscitation and sudden death.
Between April and May 2011, their search returned 62,163
tweets, which were whittled down to 15,324 messages that
contained specific information about cardiac arrest and
resuscitation.
Only 7 percent of the tweets were about specific cardiac
arrest events, such as a user saying they just saw a man being
resuscitated, or a user asking for prayers for a sick family
member.
About 44 percent of the tweets were about performing CPR and
using an AED. Those types of tweets included information on
rules about keeping AEDs in businesses and questions about how
to resuscitate a person.
The rest of the tweets were about education, research and
news events, such as links to articles about celebrities going
into cardiac arrest.
The vast majority of the Twitter users send fewer than three
tweets about cardiac arrest or CPR throughout the month. Users
that sent more tweets typically had more followers - people who
subscribe to their messages - and often worked in a health-care
related field.
About 13 percent of the tweets were re-sent, or retweeted,
by other users. The most popular retweeted messages were about
celebrity-related cardiac arrest news, such as an AED being used
to revive a fan at a Lady Gaga concert.
"I think the pilot (study) illustrated for us that there is
an opportunity to potentially provide research and information
for people in real time about cardiac arrest and resuscitation,"
Marchant said.
"I can imagine in the future we will see systems that would
automatically respond to tweets of individual users. Twitter is
a really powerful tool, and we're just beginning to understand
its abilities."
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/T2bj7u
(Reporting from New York by Andrew Seaman at Reuters Health;
editing by Elaine)