Ever since the internet became a thing, consumers have used it to discuss health issues, especially over the last 10 years as social media became a daily destination for millions of people.
Something that’s also true: women have typically underestimated heart disease.
But here’s some good anecdotal evidence that women have found their voice. The health blog Treato ran an analysis of conversations on social media and found that women accounted for 52 percent of heart disease conversations, with topics such as blood pressure and stress being mentioned the most.
What’s more, the inforgraphic Treato put together suggests women’s conversation on social media are soaring.
As part of an awareness campaign, the Go Red for Women project is monitoring the hashtag #GoRed on social media. It’s yet another evolving example of how social media is being used in healthcare to gauge public perception, which could in turn give providers some direction on how to more effectively conduct outreach for chronic diseases and public health campaigns.
To that end, the Go Red campaign has seen a six-fold increase in women posting about heart disease since 2004 on social media, when it first began the track postings. Discussion have particularly climbed since 2012.
That’s viewed as good news, particularly when you consider that researchers from the University of Pennsylvania recently used tweets to analyze the risk of cardiovascular disease, finding that the language used in tweets can be as good an indicator of risk as some traditional metrics.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
