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Twitter may increase public health advocacy

HOUSTON ─ Social media has the potential to be a caveat for public health advocacy for patients with asthma, allergic rhinitis and food allergies, according to data presented at the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology Annual Meeting.

“I think [Twitter] easily disseminates information, and can disseminate accurate, correct information from a professional source,” Cheryl A. Steiman, MD, of the University of Chicago Medical Center, told Healio.com/Allergy.

Steiman and colleagues from the Cleveland Clinic, Florida, used the search function in Twitter to gather the top 100 tweets containing the words asthma, food allergy and allergic rhinitis on Aug. 26, 2014.

Tweets were reviewed based on author and separated into two groups, either public sources or professionals such as physicians and medical journals.

Tweets in the professional category included 38 related to asthma, 28 related to food allergy, and 18 for allergic rhinitis. Tweets by allergists included eight for asthma, eight for food allergy and 15 for allergic rhinitis.

Less than 40% of the tweets were from professional sources.

Steiman said the research suggests professionals have not quite began to use Twitter to communicate effectively with patients, but the medium has promise as a tool for public health education.

“There’s a lot coming from public blogs that we didn’t stratify into the professional source,” Steiman said. “And I think it would be a great resource for parents to use credible sources in an easy to use fashion to find and search and easily disseminate [information] on twitter.” – by Ryan McDonald

Reference:

Steiman CA, et al. Abstract 224. Presented at the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology Annual Meeting; Feb. 20-24 2015; Houston.

Disclosure: Steiman reports no relevant financial disclosures.