UCSF

Background

Heart disease continues to be the leading cause of death in men and women in the United States. The COVID-19 pandemic has further led to increases in various long-term cardiovascular complications.

Objective

This study analyzed public conversations related to heart disease and heart health on Facebook in terms of their thematic topics and sentiments. In addition, it provided in-depth analyses of 2 subtopics with important practical implications: heart health for women and heart health during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods

We collected 34,885 posts and 51,835 comments spanning from June 2016 to June 2021 that were related to heart disease and health from public Facebook pages and groups. We used latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling to extract discussion topics illuminating the public's interests and concerns regarding heart disease and heart health. We also used Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (Pennebaker Conglomerates, Inc) to identify public sentiments regarding heart health.

Results

We observed an increase in discussions related to heart health on Facebook. Posts and comments increased from 3102 and 3632 in 2016 to 8550 (176% increase) and 14,617 (302% increase) in 2021, respectively. Overall, 35.37% (12,340/34,885) of the posts were created after January 2020, the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. In total, 39.21% (13,677/34,885) of the posts were by nonprofit health organizations. We identified 6 topics in the posts (heart health promotion, personal experiences, risk-reduction education, heart health promotion for women, educational information, and physicians' live discussion sessions). We identified 6 topics in the comments (personal experiences, survivor stories, risk reduction, religion, medical questions, and appreciation of physicians and information on heart health). During the pandemic (from January 2020 to June 2021), risk reduction was a major topic in both posts and comments. Unverified information on alternative treatments and promotional content was also prevalent. Among all posts, 14.91% (5200/34,885) were specifically about heart health for women centering on local event promotion and distinctive symptoms of heart diseases for women.

Conclusions

Our results tracked the public's ongoing discussions on heart disease and heart health on one prominent social media platform, Facebook. The public's discussions and information sharing on heart health increased over time, especially since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Various levels of health organizations on Facebook actively promoted heart health information and engaged a large number of users. Facebook presents opportunities for more targeted heart health interventions that can reach and engage diverse populations.