Facebook advertising may be effective way to identify patients with spondyloarthropathy earlier

LONDON —Using Facebook to increase awareness about the symptoms of inflammatory back pain and the need to seek early medical treatment may reduce the delay in the diagnosis and treatment of spondyloarthropathy, according to data presented here.

“Facebook is one of the better ways to reach the target population for inflammatory back pain,” Arumugam Moorthy, MBBS, MRCP (UK), CCT (Rheu), MRCP UK (Rheu), FRCP (Ed), of the Department of Rheumatology, University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust in the United Kingdom, said during his presentation at the EULAR Annual Congress.

Moorthy and colleagues applied a recruitment method of using Facebook for 5 months to identify adults in the community with symptoms suggestive of inflammatory back pain (IBP) and compared outcomes with that of other forms of recruitment, mainly newspaper advertising.

Of the 585 participants in the cross-sectional study, 455 adult participants were recruited through Facebook and 130 participants were recruited by a non-Facebook method. Of the non-Facebook group, 90 participants were recruited by a newspaper advertisement and 40 participants were recruited by another method. The mean age of the Facebook group was typical of IBP at 41.5 years. The mean age of the non-Facebook group was 59.4 years. Three quarters of the recruited patients were female.

Online questionnaire-based surveys to assess the two groups of recruited patients for a diagnosis of IBP showed that, among those recruited by Facebook, 56% met the Calin criteria and Assessment in Spondyloarthritis International Society (ASAS) criteria for IBP. For the group of participants recruited by non-Facebook methods, 39% met the Calin and ASAS criteria.

Most patients from each group reported consulting their general practitioner. However, few patients from either group had been referred to a rheumatologist. Regarding further investigations, 45% of the Facebook group reported having an MRI scan and 45% reported having a radiograph, whereas 50% of the non-Facebook group reported having an MRI scan and 59% said they had been for radiographs.

Researchers found Facebook advertising recruited a younger group of respondents and a higher proportion of the respondents fulfilled the criteria for a diagnosis of IBP compared to the group of patients recruited by other methods. Overall, 81% of the patients with chronic back pain and were recruited through Facebook had consulted their primary care physician and 13% of patients had been referred to a rheumatologist, therefore confirming the need for additional primary care education, Moorthy said.

“We are still lacking education in both primary care and secondary care. We need to raise the awareness of inflammatory back pain to get these patients to secondary care,” he said. – by Kristine Houck, MA, ELS

Reference:

Moorthy A, et al. Abstract # OP0145. Presented at: EULAR Annual Congress; June 8-11, 2016; London.

Disclosure: Moorthy reports the study was sponsored and funded by AbbVie.