Online social networks and inflammatory bowel disease

Enrolling patients for epidemiologic studies represents a challenge for researchers. Those who use traditional approaches, including in-person interviews and telephone or mail surveys, obtain increasingly lower participations. In the study by Martín-Fernández et al., the authors obtained 44 responses via mail and forums, and then 376 responses in just five days via Facebook. Online social networks (OSN) provide a unique opportunity to obtain epidemiologic data with resource savings and presumably collecting higher-quality information. However, disadvantages include loss of anonimity, selection and sampling biases, social acceptance bias, behavior changes, and lack of representativity.