Some Twitter users are looking for medical expertise on their favorite social networking site, Resuscitation reports.
Within a month, researchers from Dr. Rainy Merchant’s team (Department of Emergency Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, USA) found 15 messages on Twitter that contained specific information regarding CPR and cardiac arrest. The research was to show whether it is possible to find reliable information on health topics in a place that is associated rather with outbursts about breakfast just eaten or playing with a cat.
As it turned out, many people use Twitter to send and receive a wide variety of information, such as CPR and cardiac arrest. It was about personal experiences as well as questions and current events.
They searched for keywords – such as resuscitation (CPR), automatic external defibrillator (AED) or sudden death.
Between April and May 2011, 15 messages with specific information on cardiac arrest and resuscitation were found. Only 324 percent. The tweets concerned specific cases of cardiac arrest – for example, when a website user wrote that he had just seen the resuscitated person – or when another asked for prayers for a sick family member.
About 44 percent. the tweets concerned CPR and the use of an automatic defibrillator. Such statements included information about the AEDs themselves and questions about CPR. Others related to education, research and media reporting – for example, cases of cardiac arrest in celebrities.
The vast majority of Twitter users sent less than three tweets on a similar topic per month. Those who sent more had more subscribers to their messages, and their work was often in health care.
About 13 percent. tweets were retweeted by other users. The most popular messages sent to others were related to celebrities – for example, information about saving a Lady Gaga fan during a concert using a defibrillator.
Dr Merchant believes that in the future, it will be possible to use services such as Twitter more widely for information and research purposes, and to create systems that automatically respond to tweets of individual users. Some researchers and organizations have already used Twitter for public health matters. Examples include the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic or the search for the source of the Haitian cholera epidemic. (PAP)
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