A new study has found Twitter contains more than three times as many reports of adverse reactions for 23 commonly used medications than the Food and Drug Administration.
For the study, researchers analyzed 61,000 tweets they found scanning Twitter using keywords related to the commonly used prescription drugs.
Researchers found 4,400 adverse events reported on Twitter, while they only identified 1,400 adverse events reported to the FDA over the same time period and concerning the same drugs.
Although more adverse events were tweeted, the data was not as useful as the information reported to the FDA. In many cases, the information reported on Twitter did not contain as much detail about the adverse reactions as the information reported to the FDA, and the adverse event reports posted on Twitter varied greatly, which made them difficult to analyze, according to the report.
More Articles on Twitter:
Boston Children's, Harvard Medical School Given Research Access to Twitter's Data Trove
6 Statistics on Hospitals and Social Media