Twitter for clinical-trial recruitment: All but untapped, barely even explored

Of more than 1,500 tweets randomly pulled from a qualified starting cohort of more than 15,000 mentioning the term “lung cancer” over two and a half weeks in January 2015, just one lonely tweet linked to a patient recruitment website for a clinical trial.

The yawning gap may spotlight a significant opportunity fresh for the tapping, suggest the authors of a research letter published online March 3 in JAMA Oncology.

Mina Sedrak, MD, University of Pennsylvania, and co-authors report that most tweets in their sample, 83.1 percent (1,260 of 1,516) were specific to lung cancer. (They categorized the rest as “miscellaneous.”)

Of the tweets specifically dealing with lung cancer, most (56.7 percent) focused on support (358 of 1,260) or prevention (357 of 1,260) and were authored by individuals (self-identified patients, health professionals, health advocates and others).

Some 17.5 percent (221 of 1,260) were related to clinical trials.

Of these trial-related tweets, 82.8 percent concerned therapeutic trials, 12.7 percent involved nontherapeutic trials and 4.5 percent had to do with basic research.

Among the therapeutic-trial tweets, 78.6 percent concerned immunotherapy and 86.3 percent had embedded links directing users to news articles.

And then there’s the quietly stunning finding:

Just that one of the 221 trial-related tweets—.45 percent—had a link to a patient-recruitment website.

Acknowledging that theirs was a pilot study with a relatively small sample size, the authors suggest that the findings could point to an opening for more productive use of the medium as a way to recruit patients for clinical trials.

“Social media could become a very useful tool for clinical researchers but may also pose some challenges with respect to both noncoercive content and the assurance of privacy, both of which the institutional review boards will need to consider carefully,” write Sedrak et al. “Future efforts are needed to explore whether Twitter can emerge as a viable medium for promoting accrual to clinical trials.”