Study of Twitter Communications on Cardiovascular Disease by State Health Departments

The present study examines Twitter conversations around cardiovascular health in order to assess the topical foci of these conversations as well as the role of various state departments of health. After scraping tweets containing relevant keywords, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) was used to identify the most important topics discussed around the issue, while PageRank was used to determine the relative prominence of different users. The results indicate that a small number of state departments of health play an especially significant role in these conversations. Furthermore, irregular events like ebola outbreaks also exert a strong influence over the volume of tweets made in general by state departments of health.