Areas of Interest and Attitudes Toward Antiobesity Drugs: Thematic and Quantitative Analysis Using Twitter

Abstract

Background: Antiobesity drugs are prescribed for the treatment of obesity in conjunction with healthy eating, physical activity, and behavior modification. However, poor adherence rates have been reported. Attitudes or beliefs toward medications are important to ascertain because they may be associated with patient behavior. The analysis of tweets has become a tool for health research.

Objective: The aim of this study is to investigate the content and key metrics of tweets referring to antiobesity drugs.

Methods: In this observational quantitative and qualitative study, we focused on tweets containing hashtags related to antiobesity drugs between September 20, 2019, and October 31, 2019. Tweets were first classified according to whether they described medical issues or not. Tweets with medical content were classified according to the topic they referred to: side effects, efficacy, or adherence. We additionally rated it as positive or negative. Furthermore, we classified any links included within a tweet as either scientific or nonscientific. Finally, the number of retweets generated as well as the dissemination and sentiment score obtained by the antiobesity drugs analyzed were also measured.

Results: We analyzed a total of 2045 tweets, 945 of which were excluded according to the criteria of the study. Finally, 320 out of the 1,100 remaining tweets were also excluded because their content, although related to drugs for obesity treatment, did not address the efficacy, side effects, or adherence to medication. Liraglutide and semaglutide accumulated the majority of tweets (682/780, 87.4%). Notably, the content that generated the highest frequency of tweets was related to treatment efficacy, with liraglutide-, semaglutide-, and lorcaserin-related tweets accumulating the highest proportion of positive consideration. We found the highest percentages of tweets with scientific links in those posts related to liraglutide and semaglutide. Semaglutide-related tweets obtained the highest probability of likes and were the most disseminated within the Twitter community.

Conclusions: This analysis of posted tweets related to antiobesity drugs shows that the interest, beliefs, and experiences regarding these pharmacological treatments are heterogeneous. The efficacy of the treatment accounts for the majority of interest among Twitter users.

Keywords: Twitter; attitude; drug; drug therapy; obesity; pharmacotherapy; quantitative analysis; social media; thematic analysis.