Twitter, an online social networking service, is an important communication tool using messages (tweets) restricted to 140 characters. There is limited data on the use of Twitter for messaging of medical information. Initial understanding of the impact of short messaging requires an evaluation of word frequency. This study performed a word analysis of IBD Twitter messages. Social Feed Manager (SFM; Version 1.10.0; GW University, 2017) is software that can query social medical platforms to obtain information about users and messages. SFM queried Twitter’s application programming interface for 3 days to obtain all messages using #IBD. Voyant Tools (Sinclair, Rockwell, Voyant Tools Team, 2012), an open-source, web-based application for text analysis, was used to evaluate word frequency in IBD tweets and generate a cirrus of the words in IBD messages. The most frequently used words were categorized. 1589 tweets was collected with the term #IBD. The 25 most frequent words were grouped into 5 categories: IBD descriptors (32%), management (24%), user names (20%), research (12%), and other (12%). Five words were identified in >130 tweets, with ‘dr’ being the most frequent. (Figure 1) The most frequent usernames in messages included 3 physicians, a foundation, and a patient. A cirrus was created with the most frequently tweeted words. (Figure 2) Word frequency analysis of IBD tweets reveals that Twitter is a tool for users, including patients, physicians and foundations, to address IBD disease description, treatment and research. Specific physicians were frequently identified in IBD word analysis, raising the issue about whether information for disease management is sought or offered via Twitter messaging. While this study is limited based upon duration and reliance upon individual words, it serves as a foundation for future investigations that evaluate entire message content.
