Twitter can predict risk of heart attacks
Reserach from University of Pennsylvania has found that Twitter can predict a community’s risk of heart attacks.
Twitter captures the psychological atmosphere of a community. It was found that expressions of negative emotions such as anger, stress and fatigue in a US county’s tweets were associated with higher risk of heart attacks. Positive emotions were associated with lower risk.
Andrew Schwartz of the Department of Computer & Information Science, School of Engineering and Applied Science further says, ‘The relationship between language and mortality is particularly surprising, since people tweeting angry words are not the ones dying of the heart disease. But that means if many of your neighbours are angry, you are more likely to die of heart disease’.
Sneha Jha and Meghna Agrawal of the Computer and Information Science also contributed to the study in addition to Raina Merchant of Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine.
Written by: Dr. Ajay Sati.
