A Sentiment Analysis of Breast Cancer Treatment Experiences and Healthcare Perceptions Across Twitter
Table 4: 50 Most Frequently Tweeted Hashtags: A table of the most frequently tweeted hashtags (#) from all collected breast cancer tweets (left) and from sampled breast cancer patients (right). The relative computed average happiness havg for each tag is colored relative to the group average (blue- negative, orange - positive). This version is sorted by computed word happiness.
['[BOLD] Top Hashtags(#): All Breast Cancer Rank', '[BOLD] Top Hashtags(#): All Breast Cancer Term', '[BOLD] Top Hashtags(#): All Breast Cancer Tweets', '[BOLD] Top Hashtags(#): All Breast Cancer Users', '[BOLD] Top Hashtags(#): All Breast Cancer  [ITALIC] havg']
Numerous patients and survivors in our sample had identified their condition in reference to the American healthcare regulation debate. Many sampled views of the proposed legislation were very negative, since repealing the Affordable Care Act without replacement could leave many uninsured. Other tweets mentioned worries regarding insurance premiums and costs for patients and survivors’ continued screening. In particular the pre-existing condition mandate was a chief concern of patients/survivors future coverage. Hashtags (#) are terms that categorize topics within posts. Each entry contains the tweet frequency, number of distinct profiles, and the relative happiness score (havg) for comparisons. Political terms were prevalent in both distributions describing the Affordable Care Act (#aca, #obamacare, #saveaca, #pretectourcare) and the newly introduced American Healthcare Act (#ahca, #trumpcare). A visual representation of these hashtags are displayed using a word-cloud in the Appendix (Figure A4).