2 research outputs found
Exploring celebrity influence on public attitude towards the COVID-19 pandemic: social media shared sentiment analysis
The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced new opportunities for health
communication, including an increase in the public use of online outlets for
health-related emotions. People have turned to social media networks to share
sentiments related to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper we
examine the role of social messaging shared by Persons in the Public Eye (i.e.
athletes, politicians, news personnel) in determining overall public discourse
direction. We harvested approximately 13 million tweets ranging from 1 January
2020 to 1 March 2022. The sentiment was calculated for each tweet using a
fine-tuned DistilRoBERTa model, which was used to compare COVID-19
vaccine-related Twitter posts (tweets) that co-occurred with mentions of People
in the Public Eye. Our findings suggest the presence of consistent patterns of
emotional content co-occurring with messaging shared by Persons in the Public
Eye for the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic influenced public opinion
and largely stimulated online public discourse. We demonstrate that as the
pandemic progressed, public sentiment shared on social networks was shaped by
risk perceptions, political ideologies and health-protective behaviours shared
by Persons in the Public Eye, often in a negative light.Comment: 7 Pages, 4 Figure
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Traveling for Pancreatic Cancer Care Is Worth the Trip
Centralized care for patients with pancreatic cancer is associated with longer survival. We hypothesized that increased travel distance from home is associated with increased survival for pancreatic cancer patients.
The National Cancer Database user file for all pancreatic cancer patients was investigated from 2004 through 2015. Distance from the patients' zip code to the treating facility was determined. Survival was investigated using the Kaplan-Meier method. Cox hazard ratios (CoxHRs) were determined based on stage of disease, distance traveled for care, and clinical factors.
340 780 patients were identified. In the average age of 68 ± 12 years, 51% were male and 83% were Caucasian. For all stages of cancer, longer survival was associated with traveling farther (
< .001). The survival advantage was longer for Caucasians than African Americans (3.7 months vs. 2.6 months,
< .001) Travel was associated with a 13% decrease in risk of death (
< .001). Even controlling for the pathologic stage, traveling farther was associated with decreased risk of death (CoxHR = .91,
< .001).
Traveling for care is associated with improved survival for pancreatic cancer patients. While a selection bias may exist, the fact that all stages of patients investigated benefited suggests that this is a real phenomenon