Abstracts

Rationale: Epilepsy and seizures have long been associated with myths, misconceptions and stigma. Exponential growth in internet use has rapidly expanded the use of social network media, such as Twitter, for health promotion and dissemination of information to large populations. In view of the widespread popularity of Twitter, we sought to explore how seizures are being portrayed on this modern social networking website and to consider its potential for education and provision of information related to seizures.Methods: A 48 hour Twitter search (www.twitter.com) was used as a preliminary dataset to determine an appropriate classification scheme of seizure-related tweets. Seven categories were identified: metaphorical, informative, ridicule/joke, personal account, advice seeking, opinion, and miscellaneous (Table 1). A prospective qualitative content analysis was then conducted using seizure related Twitter updates from a seven day consecutive sample period in April 2011. 10,662 tweets were collected. A subsample of 1504 tweets was selected through random number generation for final analysis. Tweets were analyzed and coded by 2 independent reviewers using the predetermined coding scheme. Results: The predominant categories were personal account (n=477, 32%) and metaphorical (n=463, 31%). Informative was the third most common (n = 188, 12%) and ridicule/joke category was the fourth most common (n=142, 9%). Advice seeking , opinion and miscellaneous accounted for 3%, 6% and 6% of tweets; respectfully. Mean frequencies of tweets for each category are shown in Table 2. Kappa agreement for tweet categorization was 0.866. Conclusions: This qualitative study of Twitter content supports the notion that misconceptions and stigmatization associated with seizures continue to flourish. An astounding 40% of seizure tweets were either metaphorical or ridicule/joke themes which were generally derogatory in nature. Though highly popular social media like Twitter could be used productively to disseminate information on seizures and epilepsy it is currently propagating negative attitudes toward seizures and potentially fostering stigma.