Awareness Level of Huntington Disease: Comprehensive Analysis of Tweets During Huntington Disease Awareness Month

Background

Unawareness of Huntington disease is prevalent where patients might have a denial of illness, less reporting of symptoms such as changes in behavior or cognitive impairment, or poor coping with the disease. Understanding the awareness level of Huntington disease is crucial to provide more suggestions for public health campaigns.

Objective

This study explores the level of awareness of Huntington's disease among users of social media. We will also explore the tweeting behavior during Huntington disease awareness month, and search any missing area related to the awareness by following the framework of Social Media-Based Public Health Campaigns.

Method

We extracted tweets from April 2021-Jun 2021. We used both quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the data. We used Python programming and various natural language processing tools to process and analyze data for a quantitative investigation. We also carried out a qualitative content analysis to identify themes and subthemes in the data.

Result

We discovered that the most popular hashtag is #LetsTalkAboutHD, and after looking over the data, it seemed to us that the word "support" was used more than 54 times during that time. According to the findings of our analysis of the twitter distribution pattern in terms of time, the most tweets were sent between May 13 and May 16, particularly on Wednesday, which was the busiest day. Also, the United States and Alaska had the highest levels of engagement when the pattern of tweets based on geographic location was examined. The most common pattern in the tweets that we separated based on patterns was news, which was followed by research and clinical trials.

Conclusion

Awareness campaigns needs to follow the framework of social media-Based Public Health Campaigns to provide more comprehensive information about Huntington disease and increase the awareness level among patients and families.