Can Twitter Be a Source of Information on Allergy? Correlation of Pollen Counts with Tweets Reporting Symptoms of Allergic Rhinoconjunctivitis and Names of Antihistamine Drugs

<div><p>Pollen forecasts are in use everywhere to inform therapeutic decisions for patients with allergic rhinoconjunctivitis (ARC). We exploited data derived from Twitter in order to identify tweets reporting a combination of symptoms consistent with a case definition of ARC and those reporting the name of an antihistamine drug. In order to increase the sensitivity of the system, we applied an algorithm aimed at automatically identifying jargon expressions related to medical terms. We compared weekly Twitter trends with National Allergy Bureau weekly pollen counts derived from US stations, and found a high correlation of the sum of the total pollen counts from each stations with tweets reporting ARC symptoms (Pearson’s correlation coefficient: 0.95) and with tweets reporting antihistamine drug names (Pearson’s correlation coefficient: 0.93). Longitude and latitude of the pollen stations affected the strength of the correlation. Twitter and other social networks may play a role in allergic disease surveillance and in signaling drug consumptions trends.</p></div

Additional file 1: of Investigating paternal preconception risk factors for adverse pregnancy outcomes in a population of internet users

Survey items on paternal preconception risk factor for APOs. (DOCX 16 kb

Correlation of the ARC-US series and of the AH-US series with each pollen count by city, state and climate area.

<p>Correlation of the ARC-US series and of the AH-US series with each pollen count by city, state and climate area.</p

Map of correlations between tweets and pollen series.

<p>The map shows circles representing the level of correlation between total pollen counts for each city and ARC-US tweet series (above) and AH-US tweet series (below). The strength of the correlation is represented both by the size and by the color of the circles. Colors from blue to yellow represent increasing correlation.</p

Tweet trend for ARC case definition, tweet trend for antihistamine drugs and US total pollen count.

<p>In the upper plot: the light blue line represents the weekly averages of tweets satisfying the ARC case definition; the dark blue line represents the weekly averages of tweets including the name of an antihistamine drug. Tweet trends are obtained from tweets which were geolocalized in the US and are plotted on different scales to emphasize the similarities of the trends. In the lower plot: the red solid line represents the sum of the total pollen counts obtained from all US stations; the shaded red areas represent the single city total pollen counts. The single city total pollen counts are represented on the same scales. The sum of the total pollen counts is plotted on a specific scale to allow trend comparison with the single city pollen counts. All trends represent weekly averages for the 35-week (242 day) period starting in week 5 (January 2013) through week 40 (September 2013).</p

Additional file 1: of What drives attitude towards telemedicine among families of pediatric patients? A survey

Questionnaire on the attitude towards telemedicine among families of pediatric patients. (DOCX 25 kb