ArticleAnnals of surgery2020
Social Media Responses to Elective Surgery Cancellations in the Wake of COVID-19.
Article in Annals of surgery, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
What it found
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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.
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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.
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Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- Consulting r/Transplant: Assessment of Reddit Use and Sentiment in Solid Organ Transplantation.Transplantation direct · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectiveTo assess public response to cancellations of elective surgeries following the American College of Surgeons' (ACS) recommendation on March 13.
methodsWe queried text comments from Reddit, a social media platform and the fifth most popular website in the United States. Comments were manually reviewed to assess for relevance to elective surgery in the United States during the global coronavirus outbreak, whether the text was written by a healthcare worker (HCW), whether the user was based in the United States, and whether the text documented cancellations of surgery, expected cancellations of surgery, or surgery ongoing after the ACS announcement. Analysis of overall sentiment and negativity in comment text was performed using the Valence Aware Dictionary for sEntiment Reasoning (VADER), a validated natural language processing tool previously used in studies of health behaviors using social media. Non-parametric tests were used for subgroup comparisons based on posting date and characteristics identified during manual review.
resultsFollowing manual review, 1272 comments were included for analysis. Overall sentiment among non-HCWs became significantly more negative following the ACS announcement (P = 0.037). Overall sentiment did not significantly differ between HCWs and non-HCWs prior to the ACS announcement (P = 0.98), but non-HCW sentiment became significantly more negative than HCW sentiment after the announcement (P = 0.027). Negativity scores in posts describing cancellations were significantly higher among posts written by non-HCWs than HCWs (P = 0.028).
conclusionsCancellation of elective surgeries had an adverse emotional impact on non-HCWs. This finding highlights the importance of access to elective surgery to patients' emotional well-being.
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Registered trials
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