AI Article Synopsis

  • Cutaneous melanoma is a serious type of skin cancer that can cause a lot of health problems and emotional stress for those who have it.
  • The study looked at how people with melanoma from 14 European countries use social media to share their experiences and needs.
  • Researchers found 182,400 posts about melanoma, and after filtering them, 864 posts were relevant, mainly discussing treatments, diagnosis, and the emotional effects of living with the disease.

Article Abstract

Background: Cutaneous melanoma is an aggressive malignancy that is proposed to account for 90% of skin cancer-related mortality. Individuals with melanoma experience both physical and psychological impacts associated with their diagnosis and treatment. Health-related information is being increasingly accessed and shared by stakeholders on social media platforms.

Objective: This study aimed to assess how individuals living with melanoma across 14 European countries use social media to discuss their needs and provide their perceptions of the disease.

Methods: Social media sources including Twitter, forums, and blogs were searched using predefined search strings of keywords relating to melanoma. Manual and automated relevancy approaches filtered the extracted data for content that provided patient-centric insights. This contextualized data was then mined for insightful concepts around the symptoms, diagnosis, treatment, impacts, and lived experiences of melanoma.

Results: A total of 182,400 posts related to melanoma were identified between November 2018 and November 2020. Following exclusion of irrelevant posts and using random sampling methodology, 864 posts were identified as relevant to the study objectives. Of the social media channels included, Twitter was the most commonly used, followed by forums and blogs. Most posts originated from the United Kingdom (n=328, 38%) and Spain (n=138, 16%). Of the relevant posts, 62% (n=536) were categorized as originating from individuals with melanoma. The most frequently discussed melanoma-related topics were treatment (436/792, 55%), diagnosis and tests (261/792, 33%), and remission (190/792, 24%). The majority of treatment discussions were about surgery (292/436, 67%), followed by immunotherapy (52/436, 12%). In total, 255 posts discussed the impacts of melanoma, which included emotional burden (n=179, 70%), physical impacts (n=61, 24%), effects on social life (n=43, 17%), and financial impacts (n=10, 4%).

Conclusions: Findings from this study highlight how melanoma stakeholders discuss key concepts associated with the condition on social media, adding to the conceptual model of the patient journey. This social media listening approach is a powerful tool for exploring melanoma stakeholder perspectives, providing insights that can be used to corroborate existing data and inform future studies.

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Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9237767PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/35930DOI Listing

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