Changes in public recognition of parabens on twitter and the research status of parabens related to toothpaste / 대한구강보건학회지

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this study was to investigate changes in public recognition of parabens on Twitter and the research status of parabens related to toothpaste. METHODS: Tweet information between 2010 and October 2016 was collected by an automatic web crawler and examined according to tweet frequency, key words (2012-October 2016), and issue tweet detection analyses to reveal changes in public recognition of parabens on Twitter. To investigate the research status of parabens related to toothpaste, queries such as “paraben,”“paraben and toxicity,”“paraben and (toothpastes or dentifrices),” and “paraben and (toothpastes or dentifrices) and toxicity” were used. RESULTS: The number of tweets concerning parabens sharply increased when parabens in toothpaste emerged as a social issue (October 2014), and decreased from 2015 onward. However, toothpaste and its related terms were continuously included in the core key words extracted from tweets from 2015. They were not included in key words before 2014, indicating that the emergence of parabens in toothpaste as a social issue plays an important role in public recognition of parabens in toothpaste. The issue tweet analysis also confirmed the change in public recognition of parabens in toothpaste. Despite the expansion of public recognition of parabens in toothpaste, there are only seven research articles on the topic in PubMed. CONCLUSIONS: The general public clearly recognized parabens in toothpaste after emergence of parabens in toothpaste as a social issue. Nevertheless, the scientific information on parabens in toothpaste is very limited, suggesting that the efforts of dental scientists are required to expand scientific knowledge related to parabens in oral hygiene measures.