Cervical Myelopathy and Social Media: Mixed Methods Analysis

• DOI: 10.2196/42097
• Publication Date: 2023-04-17T08:55:47Z
• Authors: Lior M Elkaim; Jordan J Levett; Farbod Niazi; Mohammed A Alvi; Nathan A Shlobin; Joseph R Linzey; Faith Robertson; Rakan Bokhari; Naif M Alotaibi; Oliver Lasry
• Keywords: Original Paper; Canada; Advertising; Computer applications to medicine. Medical informatics; R858-859.7; Humans; Mass Media; Public aspects of medicine; RA1-1270; Social Media; United States; Spinal Cord Diseases; 3. Good health

Degenerative cervical myelopathy (DCM) is a progressive neurologic condition caused by age-related degeneration of the spine. Social media has become crucial part many patients' lives; however, little known about social use pertaining to DCM.This manuscript describes landscape and DCM in patients, caretakers, clinicians, researchers.A comprehensive search entire Twitter application programing interface database from inception March 2022 was performed identify all tweets myelopathy. Data on users included geographic location, number followers, tweets. The tweet likes, retweets, quotes, total engagement were collected. Tweets also categorized based their underlying themes. Mentions past or upcoming surgical procedures recorded. A natural language processing algorithm used assign polarity score, subjectivity analysis label each for sentiment analysis.Overall, 1859 unique 1769 accounts met inclusion criteria. highest frequency seen 2018 2019, decreased significantly 2020 2021. Most (888/1769, 50.2%) tweets' authors United States, Kingdom, Canada. Account categorization showed that 668 (37.8%) discussing medical doctors researchers, 415 (23.5%) patients caregivers, 201 (11.4%) news outlets. most often discussed research (n=761, 40.9%), followed spreading awareness informing public (n=559, 30.1%). describing personal patient perspectives living with 296 (15.9%) posts, 65 (24%) these experiences. Few related advertising (n=31, 1.7%) fundraising (n=7, 0.4%). 930 (50%) link, 260 (14%) (ie, photos videos), 595 (32%) hashtag. Overall, 847 (45.6%) classified as neutral, 717 (38.6%) positive, 295 negative.When thematically, research, DCM. Almost 25% (65/296) experiences interventions. posts pertained fundraising. These data can help areas improvement online, particularly regarding education, support,