Using Social Media to Understand Primary Discussions in Gastrointestinal Cancers: Machine Learning Approach

The incidence and mortality rates of gastrointestinal (GI) cancers are high in the United States as well as worldwide. The widespread use of social media provides unique opportunities to facilitate the dissemination of information, especially in the context of health.

We aim to characterize the public's primary discussions, including perceptions, concerns, and interests toward GI cancers, from prevention, diagnosis, and treatment to survivorship care through the social media platform Twitter, using tweets posted by Twitter users.

We analyzed 87 860 Twitter posts related to GI cancers. We used machine learning with natural language processing to identify salient topics and themes in the collected tweets.

The most common themes across all GI cancer types included cancer risk prevention and awareness outreach programs, risk factors including lifestyles (primarily diet), and cancer survivorship-related discussions (primarily GI symptoms and quality of life). GI symptom-related tweets were prevalent in patients with colorectal and stomach cancers, whereas themes of newer clinical trials, end-of-life trials, palliative care trials, and disease prognosis were common in tweets related to liver/biliary and pancreatic cancers.

Our research emphasizes the importance of individualized approaches in managing GI cancers, considering lifestyle and diet, the need for comprehensive survivorship care, raising awareness, delivering information, and improving targeted interventions related to GI cancers.

Our study suggests utilizing Twitter data to better understand the real-world interest and concerns about GI cancers among the public, which can guide future patient-centered research in this field.