Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2023 Jul 28:25:e48405.
doi: 10.2196/48405.

Results and Methodological Implications of the Digital Epidemiology of Prescription Drug References Among Twitter Users: Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) Analyses

Maria A Parker  1 , Danny Valdez  2 , Varun K Rao  1   3 , Katherine S Eddens  1 , Jon Agley  2
Affiliations

Results and Methodological Implications of the Digital Epidemiology of Prescription Drug References Among Twitter Users: Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) Analyses

Maria A Parker et al. J Med Internet Res. .

Abstract

Background: Social media is an important information source for a growing subset of the population and can likely be leveraged to provide insight into the evolving drug overdose epidemic. Twitter can provide valuable insight into trends, colloquial information available to potential users, and how networks and interactivity might influence what people are exposed to and how they engage in communication around drug use.

Objective: This exploratory study was designed to investigate the ways in which unsupervised machine learning analyses using natural language processing could identify coherent themes for tweets containing substance names.

Methods: This study involved harnessing data from Twitter, including large-scale collection of brand name (N=262,607) and street name (N=204,068) prescription drug-related tweets and use of unsupervised machine learning analyses (ie, natural language processing) of collected data with data visualization to identify pertinent tweet themes. Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) with coherence score calculations was performed to compare brand (eg, OxyContin) and street (eg, oxys) name tweets.

Results: We found people discussed drug use differently depending on whether a brand name or street name was used. Brand name categories often contained political talking points (eg, border, crime, and political handling of ongoing drug mitigation strategies). In contrast, categories containing street names occasionally referenced drug misuse, though multiple social uses for a term (eg, Sonata) muddled topic clarity.

Conclusions: Content in the brand name corpus reflected discussion about the drug itself and less often reflected personal use. However, content in the street name corpus was notably more diverse and resisted simple LDA categorization. We speculate this may reflect effective use of slang terminology to clandestinely discuss drug-related activity. If so, straightforward analyses of digital drug-related communication may be more difficult than previously assumed. This work has the potential to be used for surveillance and detection of harmful drug use information. It also might be used for appropriate education and dissemination of information to persons engaged in drug use content on Twitter.

Keywords: LDA; NLP; Twitter; data mining; digital epidemiology; drug; drug use; epidemiological; epidemiology; machine learning; natural language processing; pharmaceutic; pharmaceutical; pharmaceuticals; pharmacy; prescription; social media; text mining; tweet; tweets; unsupervised analysis.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Conflicts of Interest: None disclosed.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Conceptual diagram outlining a latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) pipeline from preprocessing through qualitative review.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Conceptual diagram detailing our analysis pipeline. API: application programming interface; LDA: latent Dirichlet application.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Coherence score plot for the iterative latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) analyses across the (A) Brand Name Corpus and (B) Street Name Corpus.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Intertopic distance map (via multidimensional scaling) for brand name tweets. PC: principal component.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Intertopic distance map (via multidimensional scaling) for street name tweets. PC: principal component.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

References

    1. Ahmad F, Cisewski J, Rossen LM, Sutton P. Provisional Drug Overdose Death Counts. National Center for Health Statistics. [2022-10-17]. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm .
    1. Ciccarone D. The rise of illicit fentanyls, stimulants and the fourth wave of the opioid overdose crisis. Curr Opin Psychiatry. 2021 Jul 01;34(4):344–350. doi: 10.1097/YCO.0000000000000717. https://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/33965972 00001504-900000000-99040 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Ellis MS, Kasper ZA, Cicero TJ. Twin epidemics: The surging rise of methamphetamine use in chronic opioid users. Drug Alcohol Depend. 2018 Dec 01;193:14–20. doi: 10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2018.08.029.S0376-8716(18)30687-2 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Auxier B, Anderson M. Social Media Use in 2021. Pew Research Center. 2021. Apr 07, [2023-03-20]. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/04/07/social-media-use-in-2021/
    1. Burgess J. The ‘digital town square’? What does it mean when billionaires own the online spaces where we gather? The Conversation. 2022. Apr 27, [2023-03-06]. http://theconversation.com/the-digital-town-square-what-does-it-mean-whe... .

Substances