The use of social networks and their implication for health communication. A bibliographic review on the use of twitter and cancer

Abstract

Cancer is one of the diseases that most circulates on social networks due to its high incidence. Twitter is one of the most effective networks for disseminating information on this topic. This review aims to compile the main findings of articles that analyse cancer communication on Twitter. For this purpose, we examined WoS and PubMed databases (2009-2019), and we carried out a content analysis of 20 articles found. 64.3% of the articles conclude that Twitter is an effective tool for health education and 58.3% consider that more significant intervention by health professionals is still needed. Therefore, it is a useful complementary tool for disease awareness and prevention, which must still go hand in hand with other educational and media literacy actions.