scholarly journals Using patient-generated health data from Twitter to identify, engage, and recruit cancer survivors in clinical trials in Los Angeles County: Evaluation of a feasibility study (Preprint)

10.2196/29958 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katja Reuter ◽  
Praveen Angyan ◽  
NamQuyen Le ◽  
Thomas A. Buchanan
Keyword(s):  
Clinical Trials ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Cancer Survivors ◽  
Feasibility Study ◽  
Los Angeles County ◽  
Health Data

Evaluation of a feasibility study using patient-generated health data from Twitter to identify, engage, and recruit cancer survivors in clinical trials in Los Angeles County (Preprint)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katja Reuter ◽  
Praveen Angyan ◽  
NamQuyen Le ◽  
Thomas A. Buchanan
Keyword(s):  
Clinical Trial ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Clinical Trials ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Cancer Survivors ◽  
Los Angeles County ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Health Data ◽  
The Social ◽  
Twitter Users

BACKGROUND Failure to find and attract clinical trial participants remains a persistent barrier to clinical research. Researchers increasingly complement recruitment methods with social media-based methods. We hypothesized that user-generated data from cancer survivors and their family members/friends on the social network Twitter could be used to identify, engage, and recruit cancer survivors into cancer trials. OBJECTIVE This pilot examined the feasibility of using user-reported health data from cancer survivors and family members/friends on Twitter in Los Angeles County for enhancing clinical trial recruitment. We focused on six cancer conditions (breast, colon, kidney, lymphoma, lung cancer, and prostate). METHODS The social media intervention involved (1) monitoring cancer-specific posts about the six cancers by Twitter users in Los Angeles (L.A.) County to identify cancer survivors and their family members/friends, and (2) contacting eligible Twitter users with information about open cancer trials at the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center (USC Norris). We reviewed both retrospective and prospective data published by Twitter users in L.A. County between July 28, 2017 and November 29, 2018. The study enrolled 124 open clinical trials at USC Norris. We used descriptive statistics to report the proportion of Twitter users who were identified, engaged, and enrolled. RESULTS We analyzed 107,424 Twitter posts in English by 25,032 unique Twitter users in L.A. County for the six cancer conditions. We identified and contacted 434 (1.7%) eligible cancer survivors (29.3 %; 127/434) and their family members/friends (70.3%; 305/434). Half of them were female and about a third was male. About one-fifth were Persons of Color, while most of them were White. About one-fifth (19.6%, 85/434) engaged with the outreach messages (cancer survivors: 38.2%, 33/85; family members/friends: 61.2%, 52/85). A quarter of those who engaged with the message were male, the majority were women, and about one-fifth were People of Color, while the majority was White. Nearly 12% (10/85) of the contacted users requested more information and 40% (4/10) set up a pre-screening. Two eligible candidates were transferred to USC Norris for further screening. Both were eligible for trial participation, but none of them enrolled. CONCLUSIONS Our findings demonstrate the potential of identifying and engaging cancer survivors and their family members/friends on Twitter. The optimization of downstream recruitment efforts such as screening for ‘digital populations’ on social media may be required. Future research could test the feasibility of the approach for other diseases, locations, languages, social media platforms, and types of research involvement (eg, survey research). Computer science methods could help to scale up the analysis of larger datasets to support more rigorous testing of the intervention. CLINICALTRIAL not applicable

scholarly journals An Assessment of Sleep Duration and Determinants of Health in a Cross-Sectional Sample of Gynecologic Cancer Survivors in Los Angeles County

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 13-25
Author(s):  
Ma’at Hembrick ◽  
Makala Conner ◽  
Heather Tarleton
Keyword(s):  
Physical Activity ◽  
Ovarian Cancer ◽  
Cervical Cancer ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Cancer Survivors ◽  
Sleep Duration ◽  
Los Angeles County ◽  
Menopausal Status ◽  
Cancer Type ◽  
Cross Sectional

Cancer survivors have an increased risk of treatment-related deficits in physical health and low health-related quality of life. In this cross-sectional study, a health questionnaire was mailed to women from the Los Angeles County Cancer Surveillance Program aged 45-70 and diagnosed with cervical, endometrial, or ovarian cancer in 2005-2014. Of the 5,941 surveys with valid postal addresses, 586 (10%) were completed and returned. The average age of respondents was 66 years old, and 36% identified as non-white. Non-white respondents were less likely to have a college degree (p<0.001), more likely to sleep for less than seven hours each night (p<0.001), experience bodily pain (p<0.001), and have a diagnosis of cervical cancer (p=0.002), when compared to white respondents. Health behaviors and determinants were examined across cervical, endometrial, and ovarian cancer cases. Cervical cancer survivors reported sleeping less than 7 hours per night, on average (p=0.015). Race was associated with sleep duration among endometrial (p=0.002) and ovarian (p=0.003) cancer survivors. Menopausal status was associated with the relationship between race and sleep duration (p<0.001). Depression was inversely related to sleep duration (p = 0.022) but was not associated with race, menopausal status, time since treatment, physical activity, or cancer type. Postmenopausal cervical cancer survivors reported a moderate concern about fall risk compared to their premenopausal counterparts (p=0.048). Physical activity levels increased as time since treatment increased (p=0.003) regardless of cancer type. Race, menopausal status, depression, and cancer type impacted the sleep duration. KEYWORDS: Health Disparities; Sleep Duration; Depression; Gynecologic Cancers; Survivorship Care

The Sunland Grizzly

2014 ◽  
Vol 91 (4) ◽  
pp. 56-63
Author(s):  
Josh Sides
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Los Angeles County ◽  
Southern California ◽  
Grizzly Bear ◽  
Science And Art ◽  
Founding Director

In 1916, Cornelius Birket Johnson, a Los Angeles fruit farmer, killed the last known grizzly bear in Southern California and the second-to last confirmed grizzly bear in the entire state of California. Johnson was neither a sportsman nor a glory hound; he simply hunted down the animal that had been trampling through his orchard for three nights in a row, feasting on his grape harvest and leaving big enough tracks to make him worry for the safety of his wife and two young daughters. That Johnson’s quarry was a grizzly bear made his pastoral life in Big Tujunga Canyon suddenly very complicated. It also precipitated a quagmire involving a violent Scottish taxidermist, a noted California zoologist, Los Angeles museum administrators, and the pioneering mammalogist and Smithsonian curator Clinton Hart Merriam. As Frank S. Daggett, the founding director of the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science and Art, wrote in the midst of the controversy: “I do not recollect ever meeting a case where scientists, crooks, and laymen were so inextricably mingled.” The extermination of a species, it turned out, could bring out the worst in people.

Unification and Its Discontents

2016 ◽  
Vol 93 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-16
Author(s):  
Brian Kovalesky
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
School District ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
School Districts ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Los Angeles County ◽  
The State ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
City Schools

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, during the height of protests and actions by civil rights activists around de facto school segregation in the Los Angeles area, the residents of a group of small cities just southeast of the City of Los Angeles fought to break away from the Los Angeles City Schools and create a new, independent school district—one that would help preserve racially segregated schools in the area. The “Four Cities” coalition was comprised of residents of the majority white, working-class cities of Vernon, Maywood, Huntington Park, and Bell—all of which had joined the Los Angeles City Schools in the 1920s and 1930s rather than continue to operate local districts. The coalition later expanded to include residents of the cities of South Gate, Cudahy, and some unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County, although Vernon was eventually excluded. The Four Cities coalition petitioned for the new district in response to a planned merger of the Los Angeles City Schools—until this time comprised of separate elementary and high school districts—into the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). The coalition's strategy was to utilize a provision of the district unification process that allowed citizens to petition for reconfiguration or redrawing of boundaries. Unification was encouraged by the California State Board of Education and legislature in order to combine the administrative functions of separate primary and secondary school districts—the dominant model up to this time—to better serve the state's rapidly growing population of children and their educational needs, and was being deliberated in communities across the state and throughout Los Angeles County. The debates at the time over school district unification in the Greater Los Angeles area, like the one over the Four Cities proposal, were inextricably tied to larger issues, such as taxation, control of community institutions, the size and role of state and county government, and racial segregation. At the same time that civil rights activists in the area and the state government alike were articulating a vision of public schools that was more inclusive and demanded larger-scale, consolidated administration, the unification process reveals an often-overlooked grassroots activism among residents of the majority white, working-class cities surrounding Los Angeles that put forward a vision of exclusionary, smaller-scale school districts based on notions of local control and what they termed “community identity.”

Measles in a Patient with Presumed Immunity — Los Angeles County, 2015

2015 ◽  
Vol 64 (39) ◽  
pp. 1123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Kamali ◽  
Chhandasi P. Bagchi ◽  
Emmanuel Mendoza ◽  
Dulmini Wilson ◽  
Benjamin Schwartz ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Los Angeles County
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