Using AI, researchers find mostly neutral, negative perception of statin therapy on Reddit
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Key takeaways:
- Researchers gauged public perception of statins and cholesterol on social media using AI.
- The analysis showed that most Reddit discussions had a neutral or negative sentiment toward statins.
More than 10,000 discussions on the large social media platform Reddit showed mostly neutral feelings toward statins, with a smaller yet significant proportion showing negative sentiment, an artificial intelligence analysis showed.
Sulaiman Somani, MD, resident in medicine at Stanford University, and colleagues utilized the semi-supervised natural language processing bidirectional encoder representations from transformers model to assess public perception of statin therapy using thousands of statin-related posts and comments on Reddit. The researchers published their findings in JAMA Network Open.
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“Despite their well-established benefits and safety, statin use remains suboptimal in high-risk individuals with guideline-recommended clinical indications. ... Understanding the reasons for statin underuse, including patient-level perspectives, is crucial to guiding public health and implementation efforts toward ASCVD prevention and treatment,” the researchers wrote. “Social media platforms have become a promising avenue to understand and glean public views on health outside of the health care setting ... A social media platform that has steadily gained popularity for health-related purposes over the past years is Reddit, a discussion-based platform whose users can post questions, comments and topics on a wide range of areas, including statins.”
Reddit has approximately 52 million daily active users and gets more than 30 billion views every month, according to the 2023 Reddit Revenue and Usage Statistics report.
The researchers hypothesized that natural language processing AI may help to gain insight on public perceptions about statins.
Statin topics and sentiment on social media
Between Jan. 1, 2009, and July 12, 2022, the AI identified 10,233 unique statin-related Reddit posts and comments containing the terms “statin” and “cholesterol,” including 961 posts and 9,272 comments from 5,188 unique authors.
Statin discussion topics were identified and classified into one of six overarching thematic groups:
- ketogenic diets, diabetes, supplements and statins;
- statin adverse effects;
- statin hesitancy;
- clinical trial appraisals;
- pharmaceutical industry bias and statins; and
- red yeast rice and statins.
Reddit communities are named using the “r/” prefix followed by their designated topic. The communities that most frequently discussed statins were r/keto (23.1%), r/Cholesterol (21.3%), r/diabetes (8.6%) and r/science (6.9%).
The researchers reported that the number of statin-related discussions increased on average 32.9% per year. The number of statin-related discussions within communities r/Supplements, r/conspiracy and r/diabetes increased yearly; however, discussions decreased in the r/Paleo and r/skeptic communities.
After a sentiment analysis, Somani and colleagues observed that most discussions had a neutral sentiment regarding statin (66.6%) and nearly all of the remainder had negative sentiment (30.8%).
Health misinformation during an ‘infodemic’
“Sentiment analysis of social media posts and discussions about statins revealed a predominantly neutral to negative sentiment. Prior work has highlighted that bad publicity surrounding statins can affect patients’ medication adherence,” the researchers wrote. “More active public health efforts are needed to monitor health-related misinformation on readily accessible social media platforms.
“[Misperceptions] posted on social media platforms can serve as seeds for the spread of misinformation,” they wrote. “For example, discussions on the social media platform used in this study are easily accessible since the platform does not require users to have an account to see content and are highly presented on search engines, with some individuals even using this platform as their default search engine. These factors may allow the spread of misinformation to susceptible cohorts, as reported in a study of misinformation spread during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prioritizing the understanding of and designing solutions for such health misinformation in the age of an infodemic was recently highlighted as a major priority for the Office of the Surgeon General, underscoring the importance of the current study.”
Reference:
- Curry D. Reddit Revenue and Usage Statistics (2023). Business of Apps. www.businessofapps.com/data/reddit-statistics/. Published Jan. 9, 2023. Accessed April 24, 2023.
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