Amid snarky comments and links to cat videos, some Twitter users turn to the social network to find and post information on health issues like cardiac arrest and CPR, according to a U.S. study.
Over a month, researchers found 15,234 messages on Twitter that included specific information about resuscitation and cardiac arrest, said the study published in the journal Resuscitation.
"From a science standpoint, we wanted to know if we can reliably find information on a public health topic, or is [Twitter] just a place where people describe what they ate that day," said Raina Merchant, the study's lead author and a professor at the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
According to the researchers, they found people using Twitter to send and receive a wide variety of information on CPR and cardiac arrest, including their personal experiences, questions and current events.
Some researchers and organizations already use Twitter for public-health matters, including tracking the 2009 H1N1 "swine flu" pandemic and finding the source of the Haitian cholera outbreak, the researchers said.
For the study, the researchers created a Twitter search for key terms, such as CPR, AED (automatic external defibrillators), resuscitation and sudden death.
