Web Conversations About Complementary and Alternative Medicines and Cancer: Content and Sentiment Analysis
| Autor: | Fabio Rinaldi, Paolo Omero, Emanuela Ferrarin, Mauro Mazzocut, Paolo De Paoli, Marialuisa Antonini, Carlo Tasso, Ivana Truccolo |
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| Přispěvatelé: | University of Zurich, Mazzocut, Mauro |
| Rok vydání: | 2016 |
| Předmět: |
Adult
Complementary Therapies Male health information online 020205 medical informatics media_common.quotation_subject neoplasms Context (language use) Health Informatics 410 Linguistics 02 engineering and technology 000 Computer science knowledge & systems Settore M-STO/08 - Archivistica Bibliografia e Biblioteconomia Terminology World Wide Web 03 medical and health sciences 0302 clinical medicine 0202 electrical engineering electronic engineering information engineering Medicine Humans Conversation 030212 general & internal medicine Misinformation misinformation media_common 2718 Health Informatics Internet Original Paper business.industry barriers to patient-doctor communication Search engine indexing Sentiment analysis data mining Barriers to patient-doctor communication Complementary and alternative medicine Data mining Health information online Neoplasms Website content analysis Data Mining Female Middle Aged Workflow 10105 Institute of Computational Linguistics sentiment analysis The Internet business website content analysis complementary and alternative medicine |
| Zdroj: | Journal of Medical Internet Research |
| ISSN: | 1438-8871 |
| Popis: | Background: The use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) among cancer patients is widespread and mostly self-administrated. Today, one of the most relevant topics is the nondisclosure of CAM use to doctors. This general lack of communication exposes patients to dangerous behaviors and to less reliable information channels, such as the Web. The Italian context scarcely differs from this trend. Today, we are able to mine and analyze systematically the unstructured information available in the Web, to get an insight of people’s opinions, beliefs, and rumors concerning health topics. Objective: Our aim was to analyze Italian Web conversations about CAM, identifying the most relevant Web sources, therapies, and diseases and measure the related sentiment. Methods: Data have been collected using the Web Intelligence tool ifMONITOR. The workflow consisted of 6 phases: (1) eligibility criteria definition for the ifMONITOR search profile; (2) creation of a CAM terminology database; (3) generic Web search and automatic filtering, the results have been manually revised to refine the search profile, and stored in the ifMONITOR database; (4) automatic classification using the CAM database terms; (5) selection of the final sample and manual sentiment analysis using a 1-5 score range; (6) manual indexing of the Web sources and CAM therapies type retrieved. Descriptive univariate statistics were computed for each item: absolute frequency, percentage, central tendency (mean sentiment score [MSS]), and variability (standard variation σ). Results: Overall, 212 Web sources, 423 Web documents, and 868 opinions have been retrieved. The overall sentiment measured tends to a good score (3.6 of 5). Quite a high polarization in the opinions of the conversation partaking emerged from standard variation analysis (σ≥1). In total, 126 of 212 (59.4%) Web sources retrieved were nonhealth-related. Facebook (89; 21%) and Yahoo Answers (41; 9.7%) were the most relevant. In total, 94 CAM therapies have been retrieved. Most belong to the “biologically based therapies or nutrition” category: 339 of 868 opinions (39.1%), showing an MSS of 3.9 (σ=0.83). Within nutrition, “diets” collected 154 opinions (18.4%) with an MSS of 3.8 (σ=0.87); “food as CAM” overall collected 112 opinions (12.8%) with a MSS of 4 (σ=0.68). Excluding diets and food, the most discussed CAM therapy is the controversial Italian “Di Bella multitherapy” with 102 opinions (11.8%) with an MSS of 3.4 (σ=1.21). Breast cancer was the most mentioned disease: 81 opinions of 868. Conclusions: Conversations about CAM and cancer are ubiquitous. There is a great concern about the biologically based therapies, perceived as harmless and useful, under-rating all risks related to dangerous interactions or malnutrition. Our results can be useful to doctors to be aware of the implications of these beliefs for the clinical practice. Web conversation exploitation could be a strategy to gain insights of people’s perspective for other controversial topics. [J Med Internet Res 2016;18(6):e120] |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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