Rhinitis, sinusitis, and ocular allergyMining social media data to assess the risk of skin and soft tissue infections from allergen immunotherapy
Section snippets
Data source
Public text–based social media data were obtained from a large database compiled by Treato Ltd (Haifa, Israel). Treato uses proprietary methods to extract large volumes of web content from health-related websites (eg, weightwatchers.com), social media (eg, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit), forums (eg, forums.thebump.com), and blogs. Their database, freely available on their website, includes more than 2 billion users' discussions, reflective of more than 40,000 medications and medical conditions.
Results
We identified 25,126 AIT posts, which were matched by social media platform to 25,126 influenza vaccine posts (Table III).
NLP identified 4088 AIT posts (16.2%) that required manual review. The most common term used to describe AIT in social media was “allergy shot” and its lexical variations (eg, plurals and misspellings). There were 6 posts (0.02%; 95% CI, 0.005%-0.043%) indicative of possible AIT-related SSTI (Table IV). Of the 6 possible SSTI posts, 4 included the terms “infection” or
Discussion
In this study, we analyzed large US-restricted public text–based social media data from sites including Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, with the aim of discovering rare adverse events less likely to be identified by traditional research methods. We identified mentions of symptoms consistent with SSTI that the poster associated with AIT, a procedure prepared using aseptic technique, or influenza administration, a procedure using a sterile pharmaceutical. In total, only 6 of 25,126 posts related
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This study was supported by the Division of Rheumatology, Allergy and Immunology, Massachusetts General Hospital. K.G.B. receives career development support from the National Institutes of Health (grant no. K01AI125631), the American Academy of Allergy,Asthma & Immunology Foundation, and the MGH Claflin Distinguished Scholar Award. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
Disclosure of potential conflict of interest: L. Zhou reports grants from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality during the conduct of the study. R. Saadon reports grants from Treato Ltd during the conduct of the study. The rest of the authors declare that they have no relevant conflicts of interest.
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Co-first author.