Abstract
Background With 500 million tweets posted daily, Twitter can provide valuable insights about
public discourse surrounding niche topics, such as facial paralysis surgery. This
study aims to describe public interest on Twitter relating to facial paralysis and
facial reanimation surgery over the last decade.
Methods Tweets containing the keywords “facial paralysis” and “Bell's palsy” posted between
January 1, 2009, and January 1, 2019, were collected using Twitter Scraper. Tweets
were screened by keywords relating to facial paralysis, and usage of these terms trended
over time. Logistic regression was used to identify correlations between the quantity
of publications per year and these terms posted on Twitter.
Results 32,880 tweets were made during the study period, with no significant difference in
the number of tweets per year. A very strong (r = 0.8–1.0) positive correlation was found between time and frequency of the term
“plastic surgery” and “transfer” (p < 0.05). A strong (r = 0.60–0.79) correlation was found between time and frequency for the following terms:
“facial reanimation,” “gracilis,” “masseter,” “plastics,” “transplant” (p < 0.05). A total of 619 studies with the keyword “facial reanimation” were published
in PubMed within the study period. A very strong, positive correlation between publications
per year and frequency was found for the terms “plastic surgery,” “function” and “esthetic,”
and a strong, positive correlation was found for the “plastics,” “transplant,” “Botox,”
“surgery,” “cosmetic,” “aesthetic” and “injection” (p < 0.05).
Conclusions An increasing number of discussion about facial paralysis on Twitter correlates with
increased publications and likely surgeon discourse on facial reanimation surgery,
driving public interest.
Keywords
facial paralysis - facial reanimation - twitter - social media - web scraping - data
mining
