The Analysis of Tweets About the Prostate Written in Korean.

Abstract

Purpose: According to development of the web 2.0 services, a lot of information including medical information has widely and rapidly spread by twitter or facebook. Recently some studies, which had analyzed the spreading of medical information, had been reported. In present study, we analyzed the quality and quantity of the medical information about prostate in twitter.Materials and Methods: The analysis was performed by one urologist and one urological resident using the searching engine ‘twtkr’. Subjects, appropriateness, Retweet (RT) and reply of tweets were analyzed. The subjects of information were sorted by medical information, oriental medical information, non-medical information, daily life issue, news, advertisement and the others. The appropriateness was further classified into complete agreement, partial agreement, near non-agreement and complete non-agreement.Results: Total 641 tweets about prostate were searched. Among 641 tweets, 198 (30.9%) were medical information, 87 (13.6%) were oriental medical information, 103 (16.1%) were non-medical information, 71 (11.1%) were daily life issue, 123 (19.2%) were news, 54 (8.4%) were advertisement and 5 (0.8%) were the others. Among medical information, there were 102 (51.5%) complete agreements, 54 (27.3%) partial agreements, 30 (15.2%) near non-agreements and 12 (6.1%) complete non-agreements. The mean number of RT of tweets was 0.99.Conclusions: In Korea, users of twitter are increasing and tweets about medical information will be also increased. The medical information tweets compromised 30.9% of all the tweets about prostate and showed 51.5% appropriateness. Thus, it is necessary to spread the more appropriate medical information about prostate in tweeter.