Vast majority of tweets about obesity are negative, study finds

Only 8.25% of 25,000-plus tweets analysed contained positive sentiments

2023-05-12

(Press-News.org) **Note: the release below is a special early release from the European Congress on Obesity (ECO, Dublin, 17-20 May). Please credit the conference if you use this story**

New research to be presented at next week’s European Congress on Obesity (ECO) in Dublin, Ireland (17-20 May), has found that tweets about obesity are predominantly negative.

The analysis, by researchers in Switzerland and the UK, also found that Twitter activity spiked around the time of significant political events.

These included comments about Donald Trump’s weight when he was US president and the launch of an obesity campaign in the UK by Boris Johnson.

“Obesity can lead to serious physical, mental, and social health problems and its prevalence is increasing worldwide among people of all age groups,” says researcher Dr Jorge Correia, of the Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes, Nutrition and Therapeutic Patient Education, WHO Collaborating Centre, University Hospitals of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.

“Understanding the public’s attitudes to, and perceptions of, obesity is key to the formulation of effective health policies, prevention strategies, and treatment approaches.

“In this study, we have leveraged the wealth of information available on Twitter to explore the sentiments of the public, celebrities and other influential people and important organisations such as the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).”

Open-source software (the Tweepy library in Python) was used to download obesity-related tweets from Twitter. Cutting-edge AI methods were then used to perform sentiment analysis and classify the tweets into positive, negative and neutral sentiments. Modelling techniques were used to identify the major topics being discussed.

25,580 tweets about obesity that were posted between December 2019 to December 2021 were extracted and analysed.

The sentiment analysis revealed a significantly higher percentage of tweets (72.97%) represented negative sentiments, followed by neutral (18.78%) and positive (8.25%).

Spikes in Twitter activity were associated with significant political events such as when the Speaker of the House of Representatives in the US, Nancy Pelosi, described the then president, Donald Trump, as “morbidly obese” (May 19, 2020).

A total of 1,003 tweets were posted on this topic over several days. Around 94% of the tweets were negative in sentiment.

Dr Correia says: “The negative portrayal of obesity by influential politicians and celebrities in may increase stigma against people living with obesity, and also harm public health by spreading misinformation.”

The launch of an obesity strategy in the UK on July 27, 2020, by the then prime minister Boris Johnson, attracted a lot of criticism from the public. Around 73.9% of the tweets about the campaign during this spike held negative sentiments.

The 25,580 tweets included in the analysis covered 243 topics. These included childhood obesity, COVID-19 vaccination, racism and high obesity rates among minorities, smoking, illicit substance use and alcohol consumption among people with obesity, environmental risk factors for obesity (such as unavailability of green spaces), polycystic ovary syndrome and surgical treatments.

The largest number of tweets related to the issue of COVID-19 vaccination for people with obesity, followed by Nancy Pelosi’s comments on Donald Trump.

The third largest group of tweets wasn’t made up of tweets from the public but of tweets from research teams about their work on obesity. Racism towards Black people was the fourth most tweeted topic.

In addition, negative tweets often talked about increased hospitalisations and death due to COVID-19 among people with obesity and about how people living with obesity are responsible for their weight.

The researchers say that their results emphasise the need to view obesity through a holistic lens.

Dr Correia explains: “We need investments in various aspects of healthcare for obesity in order to achieve better health outcomes for the population. This includes improving health information regarding obesity, promoting awareness and reducing stigma, as well as development of effective interventions.

“Campaigns should be run on platforms like Twitter to improve the information about obesity available to the public. This could be done with partnerships between the social media platforms, public and third sector organisations.”

Dr Jorge Correia, Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes, Nutrition and Therapeutic Patient Education, Unit of Therapeutic Patient Education, WHO Collaborating Centre, University Hospitals of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland. E) jorgecesar.correia@hcuge.ch

Alternative contact: Tony Kirby in the ECO Media Centre. T) +44 7834 385827 E) tony@tonykirby.com

Notes to editors:

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

This press release is based on abstract PO2.126 at the European Congress on Obesity (ECO). The material has been peer reviewed by the congress selection committee. There is no full paper at this stage.

END

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

USC research identifies biomarker that may predict treatment response to chemoimmunotherapy

2023-05-12

Cutting-edge cancer treatments like immunotherapy are offering new hope for patients, often in combination with more common approaches such as chemotherapy. But determining the best treatment combination isn't always straightforward. Many patients spend valuable time on expensive therapies with serious side effects that aren’t effective against their cancer. Now, a new discovery is poised to help. Researchers from USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center have identified a biomarker that indicates which patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) will respond well to chemoimmunotherapy. The biomarker, ...

Cervical cancer screening doubles when under-screened women are mailed testing kits

2023-05-12

CHAPEL HILL, NC -- Researchers at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center found mailing human papillomavirus (HPV) self-collection tests and offering assistance to book in-clinic screening appointments to under-screened, low-income women improved cervical cancer screening nearly two-fold compared to scheduling assistance alone. Scheduling assistance primarily consisted of helping to book an appointment for in-person screening at a clinic, regardless of whether an at-home test was offered or returned, or whether the HPV test was negative or positive. The findings from the randomized ...

THE LANCET PUB. HEALTH: Mailing at-home HPV sampling kits nearly doubles cervical screening uptake among hard-to-reach populations, US clinical trial suggests

2023-05-12

Peer-reviewed / Randomised Controlled Trial / People Clinical trial with 665 under-screened women in North Carolina (USA) investigated use of high-risk human papillomavirus (hrHPV) self-collection kits to increase cervical cancer screening uptake. Screening uptake among participants sent self-collection kits and given support to attend an in-person appointment was almost double (72%) the cervical cancer screening uptake in those only given appointment support alone (37%). More than three quarters (78%) of these underserved participants ...

International Nurses Day: World’s oldest children’s nursing organization recognizes outstanding contributions to the care of children and young people

2023-05-12

At a recent event to celebrate the Association’s 85th Anniversary, the Association of British Paediatric Nurses awarded Honorary Fellowships to eight children’s nurses in recognition of their outstanding contribution to the nursing care of children and young people. The 2023 Honorary Fellows Ann Bisbrown Lee for services to children’s nursing and for many years’ service to the Association of British Paediatric Nurses, especially in leading marketing and conference activities. Professor Steven Campbell for services to children’s nurse education and to the Association ...

Stress-management interventions may help individual healthcare workers for at least a year

2023-05-12

Interventions aimed at reducing work-related stress for individual healthcare workers may lead to improvements in how people cope with stress up to a year later. Findings from a Cochrane review of the latest available evidence build on the conclusions of a previous review in 2015 that found low-quality evidence that interventions, such as cognitive behavioural training (CBT), mental and physical relaxation, were better than none. The researchers included 117 studies of the effects of different interventions on stress alleviation in the current review, of which 89 studies were new. These 89 studies were published between 2013 and ...

Research pinpoints the time of year and hour when people have the strongest suicidal thoughts

2023-05-12

New research has identified the month when people have the strongest suicidal thoughts, and that these thoughts occur a few months before the peak of suicide behaviours in spring/early summer. It also showed the daily peak in suicidal thought is between 4-5 am. Most people assume suicide rates will be highest in winter, yet spring/early summer is when suicidal behaviours peak and this finding has baffled researchers since first identified. Research from the University of Nottingham’s School of Psychology, led in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam and Harvard University, ...

AI study finds that patients with Parkinson’s disease speak differently to healthy patients

2023-05-12

Using artificial intelligence (AI) to process natural language, a research group evaluated the characteristics of speech among patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD). AI analysis of their data determined that these patients spoke using more verbs and fewer nouns and fillers. The study was led by Professor Masahisa Katsuno and Dr. Katsunori Yokoi, Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine, in collaboration with Aichi Prefectural University and Toyohashi University of Technology. They published their results ...

Astronomers reveal the largest cosmic explosion ever seen

2023-05-12

A team of astronomers led by the University of Southampton have uncovered the largest cosmic explosion ever witnessed. The explosion is more than ten times brighter than any known supernova (exploding star) and three times brighter than the brightest tidal disruption event, where a star falls into a supermassive black hole. The explosion, known as AT2021lwx, has currently lasted over three years, compared to most supernovae which are only visibly bright for a few months. It took place nearly 8 billion light years away, when the universe was around 6 billion years old, and is still being detected by a network of telescopes. The researchers believe that the explosion is ...

Scientists find fire records inside sand dunes

2023-05-12

A previously unrecognised sedimentary archive in sand dunes could unlock a repository of fire records, a discovery that could expand fire histories across the globe. The research, conducted by Dr Nicholas Patton during his PhD at The University of Queensland, has solved a persistent problem facing historians investigating changing fire patterns. “Knowing how the frequency and intensity of wildfires has changed over time offers scientists a glimpse into Earth’s past landscapes, as well as an understanding of future climate change impacts,” Dr Patton said. “To reconstruct fire records, researchers usually rely heavily ...

Brain-belly connection: gut health may influence likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s

2023-05-11

Could changing your diet play a role in slowing or even preventing the development of dementia? We’re one step closer to finding out, thanks to a new UNLV study that bolsters the long-suspected link between gut health and Alzheimer’s disease. The analysis — led by a team of researchers with the Nevada Institute of Personalized Medicine (NIPM) at UNLV and published this spring in the Nature journal Scientific Reports — examined data from dozens of past studies into the belly-brain connection. The results? There’s a strong link between particular kinds of gut bacteria and Alzheimer’s disease. Between 500 and 1,000 species of bacteria ...

Vast majority of tweets about obesity are negative, study finds

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES: