What Online Communities Can Tell Us About Electronic Cigarettes and Hookah Use: A Study Using Text Mining and Visualization Techniques

Background

The rise in popularity of electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) and hookah over recent years has been accompanied by some confusion and uncertainty regarding the development of an appropriate regulatory response towards these emerging products. Mining online discussion content can lead to insights into people’s experiences, which can in turn further our knowledge of how to address potential health implications. In this work, we take a novel approach to understanding the use and appeal of these emerging products by applying text mining techniques to compare consumer experiences across discussion forums.

Objective

This study examined content from the websites Vapor Talk, Hookah Forum, and Reddit to understand people’s experiences with different tobacco products. Our investigation involves three parts. First, we identified contextual factors that inform our understanding of tobacco use behaviors, such as setting, time, social relationships, and sensory experience, and compared the forums to identify the ones where content on these factors is most common. Second, we compared how the tobacco use experience differs with combustible cigarettes and e-cigarettes. Third, we investigated differences between e-cigarette and hookah use.

Methods

In the first part of our study, we employed a lexicon-based extraction approach to estimate prevalence of contextual factors, and then we generated a heat map based on these estimates to compare the forums. In the second and third parts of the study, we employed a text mining technique called topic modeling to identify important topics and then developed a visualization, Topic Bars, to compare topic coverage across forums.

Results

In the first part of the study, we identified two forums, Vapor Talk Health & Safety and the Stopsmoking subreddit, where discussion concerning contextual factors was particularly common. The second part showed that the discussion in Vapor Talk Health & Safety focused on symptoms and comparisons of combustible cigarettes and e-cigarettes, and the Stopsmoking subreddit focused on psychological aspects of quitting. Last, we examined the discussion content on Vapor Talk and Hookah Forum. Prominent topics included equipment, technique, experiential elements of use, and the buying and selling of equipment.

Conclusions

This study has three main contributions. Discussion forums differ in the extent to which their content may help us understand behaviors with potential health implications. Identifying dimensions of interest and using a heat map visualization to compare across forums can be helpful for identifying forums with the greatest density of health information. Additionally, our work has shown that the quitting experience can potentially be very different depending on whether or not e-cigarettes are used. Finally, e-cigarette and hookah forums are similar in that members represent a “hobbyist culture” that actively engages in information exchange. These differences have important implications for both tobacco regulation and smoking cessation intervention design.     

Exploring relation types for literature-based discovery

Objective Literature-based discovery (LBD) aims to identify “hidden knowledge” in the medical literature by: (1) analyzing documents to identify pairs of explicitly related concepts (terms), then (2) hypothesizing novel relations between pairs of unrelated concepts that are implicitly related via a shared concept to which both are explicitly related. Many LBD approaches use simple techniques to identify semantically weak relations between concepts, for example, document co-occurrence. These generate huge numbers of hypotheses, difficult for humans to assess. More complex techniques rely on linguistic analysis, for example, shallow parsing, to identify semantically stronger relations. Such approaches generate fewer hypotheses, but may miss hidden knowledge. The authors investigate this trade-off in detail, comparing techniques for identifying related concepts to discover which are most suitable for LBD.Materials and methods A generic LBD system that can utilize a range of relation types was developed. Experiments were carried out comparing a number of techniques for identifying relations. Two approaches were used for evaluation: replication of existing discoveries and the “time slicing” approach.¹Results Previous LBD discoveries could be replicated using relations based either on document co-occurrence or linguistic analysis. Using relations based on linguistic analysis generated many fewer hypotheses, but a significantly greater proportion of them were candidates for hidden knowledge.Discussion and Conclusion The use of linguistic analysis-based relations improves accuracy of LBD without overly damaging coverage. LBD systems often generate huge numbers of hypotheses, which are infeasible to manually review. Improving their accuracy has the potential to make these systems significantly more usable.     

An examination of the effects of mountaintop removal coal mining on respiratory symptoms and COPD using propensity scores

Previous research on public health consequences of mountaintop removal (MTR) coal mining has been limited by the observational nature of the data. The current study used propensity scores, a method designed to overcome this limitation, to draw more confident causal inferences about mining effects on respiratory health using non-experimental data. These data come from a health survey of 682 adults residing in two rural areas of Virginia, USA characterized by the presence or absence of MTR mining. Persons with a history of occupational exposure as coal miners were excluded. Nine covariates including age, sex, current and former smoking, overweight, obesity, high school education, college education, and exposure to coal as a home-heating source were selected to estimate propensity scores. Propensity scores were tested for balance and then used as weights to create quasi-experimental exposed and unexposed groups. Results indicated that persons in the mountaintop mining group had significantly (p?相似文献   

Lesion analysis of language production deficits in aphasia

Background: Three aspects of language production are impaired to different degrees in individuals with post-stroke aphasia: ability to repeat words and nonwords, name pictures, and produce sentences. These impairments often persist into the chronic stages, and the neuroanatomical distribution of lesions associated with chronicity of each of these impairments is incompletely understood.

Aims: The primary objective of this study was to investigate the lesion correlates of picture naming, sentence production, and nonword repetition deficits in the same participant group because most prior lesion studies have mapped single language impairments. The broader goal of this study was to investigate the extent and degree of overlap and uniqueness among lesions resulting in these deficits in order to advance the current understanding of functional subdivision of neuroanatomical regions involved in language production.

Methods & Procedures: In this study, lesion-symptom mapping was used to determine if specific cortical regions are associated with nonword repetition, picture naming, and sentence production scores. Structural brain images and behavioural performance of 31 individuals with post-stroke left hemisphere lesions and a diagnosis of aphasia were used in the lesion analysis.

Outcomes & Results: Each impairment was associated with mostly unique, but a few shared lesions. Overall, sentence and repetition deficits were associated with left anterior perisylvian lesions, including the pars opercularis and triangularis of the inferior frontal lobe, anterior superior temporal gyrus, anterior portions of the supramarginal gyrus, the putamen, and anterior portions of the insula. In contrast, impaired picture naming was associated with posterior perisylvian lesions including major portions of the inferior parietal lobe and middle temporal gyrus. The distribution of lesions in the insula was consistent with this antero-posterior perisylvian gradient. Significant voxels in the posterior planum temporale were associated with a combination of all three deficits.

Conclusions: These findings emphasise the participation of each perisylvian region in multiple linguistic functions, suggesting a many(functions)-to-many(networks) framework while also identifying functional subdivisions within each region.     

The sustainability of a community pharmacy intervention to improve the quality use of asthma medication

What is known and Objective: A previously published asthma intervention used a software application to data mine pharmacy dispensing records and generate a list of patients with potentially suboptimal management of their asthma; in particular, a high rate of provision of reliever medication. These patients were sent educational material from their community pharmacists and advised to seek a review of their asthma management from their general practitioner. The intervention resulted in a 3‐fold improvement in the ratio of dispensed preventer medication (inhaled corticosteroids) to reliever medication (short‐acting beta‐2 agonists). This follow‐up study aimed to determine the long‐term effects of the intervention programme on the preventer‐to‐reliever (P:R) ratio. Methods: The same data mining software was modified so that it could re‐identify patients who were originally targeted for the intervention. Community pharmacists who participated in the previous intervention installed the modified version of the software. The dispensing data were then de‐identified, encrypted and transferred via the Internet to a secure server. The follow‐up dispensing data for all patients were compared with their pre‐ and post‐intervention data collected originally. Results and Discussion: Of the 1551 patients who were included in the original study, 718 (46·3%) were eligible to be included in the follow‐up study. The improved P:R ratio was sustained for at least 12 months following the intervention (P < 0·01). The sustained increase in the P:R ratio was attributed to significant decreases in the average daily usage of reliever medication (P < 0·0001). What is new and Conclusion: The follow‐up study demonstrated a sustained improvement in the ratio of dispensed preventer medication to reliever medication for asthma. The intervention has the potential to show long‐lasting and widespread improvements in asthma management, improved health outcomes for patients, and ultimately, a reduced burden on the health system.     

Treatment of sentence comprehension and production in aphasia: is there cross-modal generalisation?

Exploring generalisation following treatment of language deficits in aphasia can provide insights into the functional relation of the cognitive processing systems involved. In the present study, we first review treatment outcomes of interventions targeting sentence processing deficits and, second report a treatment study examining the occurrence of practice effects and generalisation in sentence comprehension and production. In order to explore the potential linkage between processing systems involved in comprehending and producing sentences, we investigated whether improvements generalise within (i.e., uni-modal generalisation in comprehension or in production) and/or across modalities (i.e., cross-modal generalisation from comprehension to production or vice versa). Two individuals with aphasia displaying co-occurring deficits in sentence comprehension and production were trained on complex, non-canonical sentences in both modalities. Two evidence-based treatment protocols were applied in a crossover intervention study with sequence of treatment phases being randomly allocated. Both participants benefited significantly from treatment, leading to uni-modal generalisation in both comprehension and production. However, cross-modal generalisation did not occur. The magnitude of uni-modal generalisation in sentence production was related to participants’ sentence comprehension performance prior to treatment. These findings support the assumption of modality-specific sub-systems for sentence comprehension and production, being linked uni-directionally from comprehension to production.