Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Cardio
Date Submitted: Jul 5, 2022
Open Peer Review Period: Jul 5, 2022 - Aug 30, 2022
Date Accepted: Oct 25, 2022
Date Submitted to PubMed: Nov 1, 2022
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Analyzing Public Conversations of Heart Disease and Heart Health on Facebook from 2016 to 2021: A Retrospective Observational Study Applying Latent Dirichlet Allocation Topic Modeling
ABSTRACT
Background:
Heart disease continues to be the leading cause of death for both men and women in the United States. The COVID-19 pandemic has further led to increases in various long-term cardiovascular complications.
Objective:
This study analyzes public conversations related to heart disease and heart health on Facebook in terms of their thematic topics and sentiments. In addition, it provides in-depth analyses of two sub-topics with important practical implications: heart health for women and heart health during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Methods:
We collected 34,885 posts and 51,835 comments spanning June 2016 to June 2021 that are related to heart health from public Facebook pages and groups.We used Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling to extract discussion topics illuminating the public's interests and concerns regarding heart disease and heart health and used Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) to identify the public sentiments on heart health.
Results:
We observed an increase in discussions related to heart health on Facebook. Posts and comments increased from 3,102 and 3,632 in 2016 to 8,550 (176% increase) and 14,617 (302% increase) in 2021. Overall, 35.4% posts were created after January 2020, the start of the COVID-19 outbreak. In total, 13,677 posts (39.21%) were contributed by heart health organizations. We identified 6 topics in posts, covering heart health promotion, sharing personal experiences, risk reduction education, heart health promotion for women, educational information sharing, and doctor's live discussion sessions. We identified 6 topics in comments, including sharing personal experiences, survivor stories, risk reduction discussion, religious contents, asking medical questions, and sharing appreciation and information. During the pandemic (January 2020 to June 2021), risk reduction was a major topic in both posts and comments. Unverified information on alternative treatments and promotional contents (33.4%) were also prevalent. Among all posts, 14.9% were specifically about heart health for women centering on local event promotion and distinctive symptoms of heart diseases for women.
Conclusions:
Our results tracked the public's ongoing discussions about heart disease and heart health on one prominent social media platform, Facebook. The public's discussions and information sharing on heart health increased over time, especially since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Various levels of health organizations on Facebook actively promoted heart health information and engaged a large number of users. Facebook presents opportunities for more targeted heart health interventions that can reach and engage diverse populations.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.