BACKGROUND
Approximately, 40% of patients are non-adherent to their P2Y12 inhibitors following percutaneous coronary intervention despite the increased risk for stent thrombosis and death. More research to better understand patient beliefs and attitudes of P2Y12 inhibitors is needed.
OBJECTIVE
Our objective was to use Twitter to analyze natural patient experiences of individuals using P2Y12 inhibitors.
METHODS
We collected public Twitter posts from Jan 01, 2016 to Dec 31, 2019 to identify posts related to an individual’s experience with taking P2Y12 inhibitors. Using conventional content analysis, we categorized each eligible post into key themes of adherence and further categorized each post into positive, negative, or neutral sentiments.
RESULTS
We identified 50,525 Twitter posts of which 366 met sufficient inclusion criteria. The CARRE concordance construct was developed identifying five core themes including Communication (4.7%), Affordability (25.4%), adverse drug Reactions (37.4%), patient perceived Response to treatment (11.5%), and E-(I)nconvenience with taking the medication (21%). Interestingly, 56% of the posts shared negative sentiments about taking P2Y12 inhibitors.
CONCLUSIONS
Our research is the first original investigation analyzing Twitter as a qualitative research medium to analyze individuals’ experiences using P2Y12 inhibitors. Our findings reinforced prior qualitative work using focus group interviews and surveys. Though social media offers the potential for large scale qualitative analysis with less social desirability and selection bias, we found that a key limitation includes a lack of structured investigation leading to the exclusion of many posts often missing important contextual information relevant to the research question.
CLINICALTRIAL
N/A