ArticleAdvances in radiation oncology
Reddit and Radiation Therapy: A Descriptive Analysis of Posts and Comments Over 7 Years by Patients and Health Care Professionals.
Article in Advances in radiation oncology. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Reddit users' questions and concerns about glaucoma.International ophthalmology · 2025Article
- "Hospice Care Could Be a Compassionate Choice": ChatGPT Responses to Questions About Decision Making in Advanced Cancer.Journal of palliative medicine · 2024Article
- An Examination of Patients and Caregivers on Reddit Navigating Brain Cancer: Content Analysis of the Brain Tumor Subreddit.JMIR cancer · 2022Article
- What are Ophthalmology Patients Asking Online? An Analysis of the Eye Triage Subreddit.Clinical ophthalmology (Auckland, N.Z.) · 2020Article
- Trick or treat: Social Media's dissemination power of ophthalmologic information in the pandemic context.Romanian journal of ophthalmologyReview
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
purposeReddit is a social media platform that allows health care professionals (HPs) to anonymously interact with patients. We analyzed content about radiation therapy (RT) on Reddit. METHODS AND MATERIALS: Reddit.com/r/cancer was queried with 20 search terms related to RT: IMRT, 3D-CRT, SBRT, EBRT, XRT, radiation, radiotherapy, RT, radio, rad, rads, gamma, gamma knife, gammaknife, cyber knife, cyberknife, cyber, brachytherapy, brachy, and cobalt. The search aimed to identify all posts discussing RT. A random sample of posts and their top 3 comments was selected to generate qualitative thematic codes per author consensus, which were used to characterize all posts and their top 3 voted comments. Posts were analyzed for time to first reply, mention of any specific RT modality, whether a self-identified HP responded, and time to first highly voted comment by an HP.
resultsExactly 190 posts about RT by 178 users were shared from February 2011 to May 2018, and 468 replies by 295 users were also analyzed. Twenty-nine of these users (9.8%) were HPs; however, 48 of 181 top comments were contributed by HPs compared with 45 of 288 non-top comments by HPs (odds ratio, 1.95; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.23-3.08;
conclusionsHPs did not reply often to RT posts and generally took longer to do so, but their replies were valued by users. Common themes included treatment questions, chronology, and treatment; toxicities; and social support. Proton therapy received notable attention.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.