Diabetes prevention or treatment: what is researched and what is mentioned online?

Diabetes was listed among the top ten deadliest diseases between 2000-2019 and it has increased fourfold worldwide in the last few decades. The most common type, type 2 diabetes, is linked to problems such as overweight and obesity. Research strongly suggests that obesity is preventable and so is type 2 diabetes with a healthy lifestyle. Communicating the results of such studies to the public and raising awareness help to prevent such chronic diseases and their high costs of treatment. This chapter attempts to evaluate this communication process from academia to the public for the research published in the areas of diabetes prevention and treatment. The main objectives are to: create a map of research articles and their MeSH terms on the prevention or treatment of diabetes; create the same map based on articles’ mentions in different Altmetrics platforms including news, blogs, Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia; and finally comparing the two maps for similarities and differences. In order to get a large relevant data set of research articles in diabetes, a query of relevant MeSH headings was run in Pubmed and a collection of 155k articles published from 2011 to 2020 was extracted. Using MeSH Topical Qualifiers, articles related to ‘Prevention and Control’ of diabetes and different therapies of diabetes (‘Therapy’, ‘Drug Therapy’, ‘Diet Therapy’, & ‘Radiotherapy’) were identified. The results show that around 30 per cent of articles are related to a type of therapy. Drug therapy with 20 per cent of articles is the dominant topic while only 6 per cent of articles are about prevention and control of diabetes. The online mentions of diabetes articles were tracked in news outlets, blog posts, tweets, Facebook posts and Wikipedia articles through searching their PMIDs in the Almetric.com database. Preliminary results from the social media set show that around 65 per cent of articles on prevention of diabetes are shared in Twitter, news, Facebook and blogs, even though a small collection of these articles is available. Articles on the prevention of type 2 diabetes, obesity and diabetic foot are highly discussed in these platforms.