Twitter discourse on nicotine as potential prophylactic or therapeutic for COVID-19

  1. Ramakanth Kavuluru
  2. Jiho Noh
  3. Shyanika W. Rose

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Abstract

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  1. Version published to 10.1016/j.drugpo.2021.103470
  2. Version published to 10.1101/2021.01.05.21249284v2 on medRxiv
  3. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.01.05.21249284: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    RandomizationFrom this subset, we (first and second author together) annotated a set of 400 tweets randomly selected to identify if the tweets are actually discussing potential prevention or treatment aspects of nicotine for COVID-19.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    Before we conclude, we outline some limitations: only public English language tweets were analyzed; so the findings cannot be generalized to the entire conversation about COVID-19 and tobacco use on all social networks especially on platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp where most of the messaging is not public. The discussion is likely evolving as the pandemic changes and this only captures discussion during the specific duration of January to July in 2020. Overall, our results demonstrate that there is a nontrivial amount of chatter on Twitter that promotes the not-yet-validated nicotine hypothesis for COVID-19 which at times is also extrapolated to vaping and smoking, spreading false hope to tobacco product consumers without conclusive evidence. Also given evidence of increased risk of adverse outcomes from COVID-19 among smokers compared with non-smokers, social media messages conflating the ‘nicotine hypothesis’ with potential benefits of smoking for COVID-19 may be detrimental to smokers9. On Twitter, studies have shown that false news stories reach significantly faster and farther than true ones10. Recent findings also show that exposure to misinformation that smoking helps with COVID-19 actually leads to an increase in tobacco consumption11. Hence, federal health agencies, healthcare organizations, physicians should all be extremely vigilant in communicating verified information to the general public and patients in the wake of nicotine related misinformation about COV...

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

    SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.

  4. Version published to 10.1101/2021.01.05.21249284v1 on medRxiv