Tracking opioid misuse using Twitter

Written by Kelvin Adu-Darko

Research conducted by Michael Chary and his team at New York Presbyterian/Queens Hospital (NY, USA) has demonstrated the effective use of Twitter to estimate the dynamics of opioid misuse across the USA. After analyzing over 3.6 million tweets, Chary and his team were able to show that their estimations of opioid misuse countrywide significantly correlated to US government estimates. In this study, a list of keywords associated with the use of prescription opioids was curated by a medical toxicologist and an emergency physician from the research team. The researchers then used a software to obtain tweets between 2012 and 2014...

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