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Social media as an emerging tool for reducing prescription opioid misuse risk factors.

ABSTRACT: Interventions are urgently needed to reduce prescription opioid misuse risk factors, including anxiety and concomitant use of sedatives. However, only a limited number of randomized controlled opioid intervention trials have been conducted. We sought to determine whether an online behavior change/support community, compared to a control Facebook group, could reduce anxiety and opioid misuse among chronic pain patients. 51 high-risk non-cancer chronic pain patients were randomly assigned to either a Harnessing Online Peer Education (HOPE) peer-led online behavior change intervention or a control group (no peer leaders) on Facebook for 12 weeks. Inclusion criteria were: 18 years or older, a UCLA Health System patient, prescribed an opioid for non-cancer chronic pain between 3 and 12 months ago, and a score of ?9 on the Current Opioid Misuse Measure (COMM) and/or concomitant use of benzodiazepines. Participation in the online community was voluntary. Patients completed baseline and follow-up assessments on Generalized Anxiety Disorder screener (GAD-7), COMM, and frequency of social media discussions about pain and opioid use. Compared to control group participants, intervention participants showed a baseline-to-follow-up decrease in anxiety, and more frequently used social media to discuss pain, prescription opioid use, coping strategies, places to seek help, and alternative therapies for pain. Both groups showed a baseline to follow-up decrease in COMM score. Preliminary results support the use an online community interventions as a low-cost tool to decrease risk for prescription opioid misuse and its complications.

SUBMITTER: Young SD

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7062763 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Social media as an emerging tool for reducing prescription opioid misuse risk factors.

Young Sean D SD Lee Sung-Jae SJ Perez Hendry H Gill Navkiran N Gelberg Lillian L Heinzerling Keith K

Heliyon 20200306 3

Interventions are urgently needed to reduce prescription opioid misuse risk factors, including anxiety and concomitant use of sedatives. However, only a limited number of randomized controlled opioid intervention trials have been conducted. We sought to determine whether an online behavior change/support community, compared to a control Facebook group, could reduce anxiety and opioid misuse among chronic pain patients. 51 high-risk non-cancer chronic pain patients were randomly assigned to eithe ...[more]

PMID: 32181385

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Project description:BackgroundThe misuse of prescription opioids (MUPO) is a leading public health concern. Social media are playing an expanded role in public health research, but there are few methods for estimating established epidemiological metrics from social media. The purpose of this study was to demonstrate that the geographic variation of social media posts mentioning prescription opioid misuse strongly correlates with government estimates of MUPO in the last month.MethodsWe wrote software to acquire publicly available tweets from Twitter from 2012 to 2014 that contained at least one keyword related to prescription opioid use (n = 3,611,528). A medical toxicologist and emergency physician curated the list of keywords. We used the semantic distance (SemD) to automatically quantify the similarity of meaning between tweets and identify tweets that mentioned MUPO. We defined the SemD between two words as the shortest distance between the two corresponding word-centroids. Each word-centroid represented all recognized meanings of a word. We validated this automatic identification with manual curation. We used Twitter metadata to estimate the location of each tweet. We compared our estimated geographic distribution with the 2013-2015 National Surveys on Drug Usage and Health (NSDUH).ResultsTweets that mentioned MUPO formed a distinct cluster far away from semantically unrelated tweets. The state-by-state correlation between Twitter and NSDUH was highly significant across all NSDUH survey years. The correlation was strongest between Twitter and NSDUH data from those aged 18-25 (r = 0.94, p < 0.01 for 2012; r = 0.94, p < 0.01 for 2013; r = 0.71, p = 0.02 for 2014). The correlation was driven by discussions of opioid use, even after controlling for geographic variation in Twitter usage.ConclusionsMentions of MUPO on Twitter correlate strongly with state-by-state NSDUH estimates of MUPO. We have also demonstrated that a natural language processing can be used to analyze social media to provide insights for syndromic toxicosurveillance.

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Social media as an emerging tool for reducing prescription opioid misuse risk factors.

Publications

Social media as an emerging tool for reducing prescription opioid misuse risk factors.

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