ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION: Twitter has become an information source for healthcare professionals on a variety of critical care topics. The role Twitter plays as a resource for evidence to guide nutrition therapy is unknown. The purpose of this study is to describe dissemination of Pediatric and Adult critical care nutrition knowledge via Twitter, including frequency, scope of network, disciplines involved, and citation of literature. METHODS: Symplur Analytics was used to analyze the digital footprint of nutrition using the #ICU and #PedsICU hashtags between July 1, 2019 through June 30th, 2020. The top 1000 hashtags and keywords used in combination with #ICU or #PedsICU were examined to identify the most common nutrition related terms. RESULTS: The final dataset included 2837 tweets by 1349 users resulting in 7.5 million impressions. Data is presented as n (%). Most users tweeted once, with 222 users tweeting more than one tweet. Over half of tweeters were female [n=710 (53%)]. Most nutrition tweeters were non-physician healthcare providers [n=297 (22%)] with the next highest profession being doctors [n= 228 (17%)]. Fifty users tweeted 21% of the tweets (range 4-96 tweets/user);16 of these were dietitians, 13 physicians, and 12 organizations. Geographic data was available on 451 of the users;most tweets emanated from the US (n=149), the UK (n=132), Australia (n=20) and Canada (n=16). The most common hashtags used in this dataset were #COVID19, #FOAMcc and #CriticalCare and the most common keywords, ?enteral?, ?patients?, and ?early?. Eight of the 11 most tweeted links were journal articles and webinars from professional societies, and 3 were industry sponsored podcasts/webinars. CONCLUSIONS: This is the first analysis of the role Twitter plays in the dissemination of critical care nutrition therapy information. A limitation to this approach is variability in spelling across the globe. Future research should focus on identifying and analyzing those spellings not represented here to formulate a more comprehensive approach to information sharing. Identification and promotion of a single hashtag may further enhance the usability of ICU and Peds ICU nutrition knowledge internationally.