Gaps in Public Awareness About BRCA and Genetic Testing in Prostate Cancer: Social Media Landscape Analysis.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT: Background
Genetic testing, particularly for BRCA1/2, is increasingly important in prostate cancer (PCa) care, with impact on PCa management and hereditary cancer risk. However, the extent of public awareness and online discourse on social media is unknown, and presents opportunities to identify gaps and enhance population awareness and uptake of advances in PCa precision medicine.Objective
The objective of this study was to characterize activity and engagement across multiple social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube) regarding BRCA and genetic testing for PCa compared with breast cancer, which has a long history of public awareness, advocacy, and prominent social media presence.Methods
The Symplur Signals online analytics platform was used to obtain metrics for tweets about (1) #BRCA and #breastcancer, (2) #BRCA and #prostatecancer, (3) #genetictesting and #breastcancer, and (4) #genetictesting and #prostatecancer from 2016 to 2020. We examined the total number of tweets, users, and reach for each hashtag, and performed content analysis for a subset of tweets. Facebook and YouTube were queried using analogous search terms, and engagement metrics were calculated.Results
During a 5-year period, there were 10,005 tweets for #BRCA and #breastcancer, versus 1008 tweets about #BRCA and #prostatecancer. There were also more tweets about #genetictesting and #breastcancer (n=1748), compared with #genetic testing and #prostatecancer (n=328). Tweets about genetic testing (12,921,954) and BRCA (75,724,795) in breast cancer also had substantially greater reach than those about PCa (1,463,777 and 4,849,905, respectively). Facebook groups and pages regarding PCa and BRCA/genetic testing had fewer average members, new members, and new posts, as well as fewer likes and followers, compared with breast cancer. Facebook videos had more engagement than YouTube videos across both PCa and breast cancer content.Conclusions
There is substantially less social media engagement about BRCA and genetic testing in PCa compared with breast cancer. This landscape analysis provides insights into strategies for leveraging social media platforms to increase public awareness about PCa germline testing, including use of Facebook to share video content and Twitter for discussions with health professionals.
SUBMITTER: Loeb S
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8550715 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Similar Datasets
Project description:Publicly available hospital quality reports seek to inform consumers of important healthcare quality and affordability attributes, and may inform consumer decision-making. To understand how much consumers search for such information online on one Internet search engine, whether they mention such information in social media and how positively they view this information.A leading Internet search engine (Google) was the main focus of the study. Google Trends and Google Adwords keyword analyses were performed for national and Californian searches between 1 August 2012 and 31 July 2013 for keywords related to 'top hospital', best hospital', and 'hospital quality', as well as for six specific hospital quality reports. Separately, a proprietary social media monitoring tool was used to investigate blog, forum, social media and traditional media mentions of, and sentiment towards, major public reports of hospital quality in California in 2012.(1) Counts of searches for keywords performed on Google; (2) counts of and (3) sentiment of mentions of public reports on social media.National Google search volume for 75 hospital quality-related terms averaged 610 700 searches per month with strong variation by keyword and by state. A commercial report (Healthgrades) was more commonly searched for nationally on Google than the federal government's Hospital Compare, which otherwise dominated quality-related search terms. Social media references in California to quality reports were generally few, and commercially produced hospital quality reports were more widely mentioned than state (Office of Statewide Healthcare Planning and Development (OSHPD)), or non-profit (CalHospitalCompare) reports.Consumers are somewhat aware of hospital quality based on Internet search activity and social media disclosures. Public stakeholders may be able to broaden their quality dissemination initiatives by advertising on Google or Twitter and using social media interactively with consumers looking for relevant information.
| S-EPMC3963102 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Foodborne illness is prevented by inspection and surveillance conducted by health departments across America. Appropriate restaurant behavior is enforced and monitored via public health inspections. However, surveillance coverage provided by state and local health departments is insufficient in preventing the rising number of foodborne illness outbreaks. To address this need for improved surveillance coverage we conducted a supplementary form of public health surveillance using social media data: Yelp.com restaurant reviews in the city of San Francisco. Yelp is a social media site where users post reviews and rate restaurants they have personally visited. Presence of keywords related to health code regulations and foodborne illness symptoms, number of restaurant reviews, number of Yelp stars, and restaurant price range were included in a model predicting a restaurant's likelihood of health code violation measured by the assigned San Francisco public health code rating. For a list of major health code violations see (S1 Table). We built the predictive model using 71,360 Yelp reviews of restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area. The predictive model was able to predict health code violations in 78% of the restaurants receiving serious citations in our pilot study of 440 restaurants. Training and validation data sets each pulled data from 220 restaurants in San Francisco. Keyword analysis of free text within Yelp not only improved detection of high-risk restaurants, but it also served to identify specific risk factors related to health code violation. To further validate our model we applied the model generated in our pilot study to Yelp data from 1,542 restaurants in San Francisco. The model achieved 91% sensitivity 74% specificity, area under the receiver operator curve of 98%, and positive predictive value of 29% (given a substandard health code rating prevalence of 10%). When our model was applied to restaurant reviews in New York City we achieved 74% sensitivity, 54% specificity, area under the receiver operator curve of 77%, and positive predictive value of 25% (given a prevalence of 12%). Model accuracy improved when reviews ranked highest by Yelp were utilized. Our results indicate that public health surveillance can be improved by using social media data to identify restaurants at high risk for health code violation. Additionally, using highly ranked Yelp reviews improves predictive power and limits the number of reviews needed to generate prediction. Use of this approach as an adjunct to current risk ranking of restaurants prior to inspection may enhance detection of those restaurants participating in high risk practices that may have gone previously undetected. This model represents a step forward in the integration of social media into meaningful public health interventions.
| S-EPMC4811425 | biostudies-literature
Project description:As public discourse continues to progress online, it is important for mental health advocates, public health officials, and other curious parties and stakeholders, ranging from researchers, to those affected by the issue, to be aware of the advancing new mediums in which the public can share content ranging from useful resources and self-help tips to personal struggles with respect to both illness and its stigmatization. A better understanding of this new public discourse on mental health, often framed as social media campaigns, can help perpetuate the allocation of sparse mental health resources, the need for educational awareness, and the usefulness of community, with an opportunity to reach those seeking help at the right moment. The objective of this study was to understand the nature of and engagement around mental health content shared on mental health campaigns, specifically #MyTipsForMentalHealth on Twitter around World Mental Health Awareness Day in 2017. We collected 14,217 Twitter posts from 10,805 unique users between September and October 2017 that contained the hashtag #MyTipsForMentalHealth. With the involvement of domain experts, we hand-labeled 700 posts and categorized them as (a) Fact, (b) Stigmatizing, (c) Inspirational, (d) Medical/Clinical Tip, (e) Resource Related, (f) Lifestyle or Social Tip or Personal View, and (g) Off Topic. After creating a "seed" machine learning classifier, we used both unsupervised and semi supervised methods to classify posts into the various expert identified topical categories. We also performed a content analysis to understand how information on different topics spread through social networks. Our support vector machine classification algorithm achieved a mean cross-validation accuracy of 0.81 and accuracy of 0.64 on unseen data. We found that inspirational Twitter posts were the most spread with a mean of 4.17 retweets, and stigmatizing content was second with a mean of 3.66 retweets. Classification of social media-related mental health interactions offers valuable insights on public sentiment as well as a window into the evolving world of online self-help and the varied resources within. Our results suggest an important role for social media-based peer support to not only guide information seekers to useful content and local resources but also illuminate the socially-insular aspects of stigmatization. However, our results also reflect the challenges of quantifying the heterogeneity of mental health content on social media and the need for novel machine learning methods customized to the challenges of the field.
| S-EPMC6875652 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundDespite the growing body of literature examining social media in health contexts, including public health communication, promotion, and surveillance, limited insight has been provided into how the utility of social media may vary depending on the particular public health objectives governing an intervention. For example, the extent to which social media platforms contribute to enhancing public health awareness and prevention during epidemic disease transmission is currently unknown. Doubtlessly, coronavirus disease (COVID-19) represents a great challenge at the global level, aggressively affecting large cities and public gatherings and thereby having substantial impacts on many health care systems worldwide as a result of its rapid spread. Each country has its capacity and reacts according to its perception of threat, economy, health care policy, and the health care system structure. Furthermore, we noted a lack of research focusing on the role of social media campaigns in public health awareness and public protection against the COVID-19 pandemic in Jordan as a developing country.ObjectiveThe purpose of this study was to examine the influence of social media platforms on public health protection against the COVID-19 pandemic via public health awareness and public health behavioral changes as mediating factors in Jordan.MethodsA quantitative approach and several social media platforms were used to collect data via web questionnaires in Jordan, and a total of 2555 social media users were sampled. This study used structural equation modeling to analyze and verify the study variables.ResultsThe main findings revealed that the use of social media platforms had a significant positive influence on public health protection against COVID-19 as a pandemic. Public health awareness and public health behavioral changes significantly acted as partial mediators in this relationship. Therefore, a better understanding of the effects of the use of social media interventions on public health protection against COVID-19 while taking public health awareness and behavioral changes into account as mediators should be helpful when developing any health promotion strategy plan.ConclusionsOur findings suggest that the use of social media platforms can positively influence awareness of public health behavioral changes and public protection against COVID-19. Public health authorities may use social media platforms as an effective tool to increase public health awareness through dissemination of brief messages to targeted populations. However, more research is needed to validate how social media channels can be used to improve health knowledge and adoption of healthy behaviors in a cross-cultural context.
| S-EPMC7439806 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Defects in DNA repair and the protection of stalled DNA replication forks are thought to underlie the chemosensitivity of tumors deficient in the hereditary breast cancer genes BRCA1 and BRCA2 (BRCA). Challenging this assumption are recent findings that indicate chemotherapies, such as cisplatin used to treat BRCA-deficient tumors, do not initially cause DNA double-strand breaks (DSB). Here, we show that ssDNA replication gaps underlie the hypersensitivity of BRCA-deficient cancer and that defects in homologous recombination (HR) or fork protection (FP) do not. In BRCA-deficient cells, ssDNA gaps developed because replication was not effectively restrained in response to stress. Gap suppression by either restoration of fork restraint or gap filling conferred therapy resistance in tissue culture and BRCA patient tumors. In contrast, restored FP and HR could be uncoupled from therapy resistance when gaps were present. Moreover, DSBs were not detected after therapy when apoptosis was inhibited, supporting a framework in which DSBs are not directly induced by genotoxic agents, but rather are induced from cell death nucleases and are not fundamental to the mechanism of action of genotoxic agents. Together, these data indicate that ssDNA replication gaps underlie the BRCA cancer phenotype, "BRCAness," and we propose they are fundamental to the mechanism of action of genotoxic chemotherapies. SIGNIFICANCE: This study suggests that ssDNA replication gaps are fundamental to the toxicity of genotoxic agents and underlie the BRCA-cancer phenotype "BRCAness," yielding promising biomarkers, targets, and opportunities to resensitize refractory disease.See related commentary by Canman, p. 1214.
| S-EPMC8026497 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Individuals, communities, and societies ascribe a diverse array of values to landscapes. These values are shaped by the aesthetic, cultural, and recreational benefits and services provided by those landscapes. However, across the globe, processes such as urbanization, agricultural intensification, and abandonment are threatening landscape integrity, altering the personally meaningful connections people have toward specific places. Existing methods used to study landscape values, such as social surveys, are poorly suited to capture dynamic landscape-scale processes across large geographic extents. Social media data, by comparison, can be used to indirectly measure and identify valuable features of landscapes at a regional, continental, and perhaps even worldwide scale. We evaluate the usefulness of different social media platforms-Panoramio, Flickr, and Instagram-and quantify landscape values at a continental scale. We find Panoramio, Flickr, and Instagram data can be used to quantify landscape values, with features of Instagram being especially suitable due to its relatively large population of users and its functional ability of allowing users to attach personally meaningful comments and hashtags to their uploaded images. Although Panoramio, Flickr, and Instagram have different user profiles, our analysis revealed similar patterns of landscape values across Europe across the three platforms. We also found variables describing accessibility, population density, income, mountainous terrain, or proximity to water explained a significant portion of observed variation across data from the different platforms. Social media data can be used to extend our understanding of how and where individuals ascribe value to landscapes across diverse social, political, and ecological boundaries.
| S-EPMC5135303 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Individuals, communities, and societies ascribe a diverse array of values to landscapes. These values are shaped by the aesthetic, cultural, and recreational benefits and services provided by those landscapes. However, across the globe, processes such as urbanization, agricultural intensification, and abandonment are threatening landscape integrity, altering the personally meaningful connections people have toward specific places. Existing methods used to study landscape values, such as social surveys, are poorly suited to capture dynamic landscape-scale processes across large geographic extents. Social media data, by comparison, can be used to indirectly measure and identify valuable features of landscapes at a regional, continental, and perhaps even worldwide scale. We evaluate the usefulness of different social media platforms-Panoramio, Flickr, and Instagram-and quantify landscape values at a continental scale. We find Panoramio, Flickr, and Instagram data can be used to quantify landscape values, with features of Instagram being especially suitable due to its relatively large population of users and its functional ability of allowing users to attach personally meaningful comments and hashtags to their uploaded images. Although Panoramio, Flickr, and Instagram have different user profiles, our analysis revealed similar patterns of landscape values across Europe across the three platforms. We also found variables describing accessibility, population density, income, mountainous terrain, or proximity to water explained a significant portion of observed variation across data from the different platforms. Social media data can be used to extend our understanding of how and where individuals ascribe value to landscapes across diverse social, political, and ecological boundaries.
| S-EPMC5135303 | biostudies-literature
Project description:WHAT IS ALREADY KNOWN ABOUT THIS SUBJECT * Recruitment is key to the success of clinical trials. * Many clinical trials fail to achieve adequate recruitment. * Public understanding and engagement in clinical research could be improved. WHAT THIS STUDY ADDS * 'Get Randomised' is the first campaign of its kind in the UK. * It is possible to improve public awareness of clinical research using the media. * Further work is needed to determine whether improved public awareness leads to increased participation in clinical research in the future. AIM To increase public awareness and understanding of clinical research in Scotland. METHODS A generic media campaign to raise public awareness of clinical research was launched in 2008. The 'Get Randomised' campaign was a Scotland-wide initiative led by the University of Dundee in collaboration with other Scottish universities. Television, radio and newspaper advertising showed leading clinical researchers, general practitioners and patients informing the public about the importance of randomised clinical trials (RCTs). 'Get Randomised' was the central message and interested individuals were directed to the http://www.getrandomised.org website for more information. To assess the impact of the campaign, cross-sectional surveys were conducted in representative samples of 1040 adults in Scotland prior to campaign launch and again 6 months later. RESULTS There was an improvement in public awareness of clinical trials following the campaign; 56.7% [95% confidence interval (CI) 51.8, 61.6] of the sample recalled seeing or hearing advertising about RCTs following the campaign compared with 14.8% (10.8, 18.9) prior to the campaign launch (difference = 41.4%; 95% CI for difference 35.6, 48.3; P < 0.01). Of those who recalled the advertising, 49% felt that the main message was that people should take part more in medical research. However, on whether they would personally take part in a clinical trial if asked, there was little difference in response following the campaign ['yes' 31.3% (28.4, 34.1) prior; 30.4% (27.6, 33.2) following; difference =-0.9%; 95% CI for difference -4.8, 3.1%; P= 0.92]. CONCLUSIONS It is possible to raise public awareness of clinical research using the media, but further efforts may be required to influence individuals' decisions to take part in clinical research.
| S-EPMC2817445 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Purpose of reviewThis review summarizes recent advances in prostate cancer (PCa) genetics.Recent findingsUpwards of 20% of metastatic castration-resistant prostate tumors (mCRPC) carry homologous recombination (HR) repair gene mutations, of which ~ 10% are germline (inherited). Another ~ 5% exhibit microsatellite instability (MSI-H) and/or mismatch repair deficiency (MMRd). Pembrolizumab is approved for tumors with MMRd, thus patients with mCRPC and MMRd are candidates for pembrolizumab. Emerging data indicate that platinum chemotherapy and poly ADP-ribose polymerase inhibitors (PARPi) are effective in PCa exhibiting HR deficiency. NCCN guidelines now recommend germline and somatic tumor testing in specific clinical scenarios due to treatment and family implications. Genetic testing in PCa patients may inform prognosis, treatment options, and have implications for family counseling. PARPi, platinum chemotherapy, and immune checkpoint inhibitors are promising targeted therapies for PCa with specific molecular features. Therapeutic advances, along with importance to relatives, are driving genetic testing in prostate cancer.
| S-EPMC10832578 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundPrior research suggests that social media-based public health campaigns are often targeted by countercampaigns.ObjectiveUsing reactance theory as the theoretical framework, this research characterizes the nature of public response to tobacco prevention messages disseminated via a social media-based campaign. We also examine whether agreement with the prevention messages is associated with comment tone and nature of the contribution to the overall discussion.MethodsUser comments to tobacco prevention messages, posted between April 19, 2017 and July 12, 2017, were extracted from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Two coders categorized comments in terms of tone, agreement with message, nature of contribution, mentions of government agency and regulation, promotional or spam comments, and format of comment. Chi-square analyses tested associations between agreement with the message and tone of the public response and the nature of contributions to the discussions.ResultsOf the 1242 comments received (Twitter: n=1004; Facebook: n=176; Instagram: n=62), many comments used a negative tone (42.75%) and disagreed with the health messages (39.77%), while the majority made healthy contributions to the discussions (84.38%). Only 0.56% of messages mentioned government agencies, and only 0.48% of the comments were antiregulation. Comments employing a positive tone (84.13%) or making healthy contributions (69.11%) were more likely to agree with the campaign messages (P=0.01). Comments employing a negative tone (71.25%) or making toxic contributions (36.26%) generally disagreed with the messages (P=0.01).ConclusionsThe majority of user comments in response to a tobacco prevention campaign made healthy contributions. Our findings encourage the use of social media to promote dialogue about controversial health topics such as smoking. However, toxicity was characteristic of comments that disagreed with the health messages. Managing negative and toxic comments on social media is a crucial issue for social media-based tobacco prevention campaigns to consider.
| S-EPMC7752523 | biostudies-literature