Correspondence on 'Mining social media data to investigate patient perceptions regarding DMARD pharmacotherapy for rheumatoid arthritis'.

In their recent article, Sharma et al 1 posed an interesting research question where they used social media data to examine patients’ perceptions of disease modifying anti-rheumatic drug (DMARD) pharmacotherapy for rheumatoid arthritis (RA). The authors used the web analytics platform Treato, which provides data from multiple social media sites. They conducted a sentiment analysis towards DMARDs and identified patient beliefs within the positive and negative sentiment.\n\nWhile we agree with the authors’ view that social media provides a valuable data source to explore patients’ perspectives, the study design leaves uncertainties about the authors’ results and conclusions. Our primary concern is about the claim that the study establishes causality based on research data of uncertain, potentially low quality and correlations that denote the association between two quantitative variables.\n\nFirst, the type of data that was included in the data analysis is unclear. The authors did not describe a clear data search strategy (eg, keywords, phrases, hashtags), and they did not provide evidence about the relevance of the included data to the research question. …