Background: Social media platforms offer free opportunities for patients and families to interact with others facing similar health issues and to access educational content, even in resource-limited settings. However, their use as educational tools by health professionals (HPs) remains limited. Moreover, there is a lack of knowledge about the popularity, engagement metrics, misinformation level, and quality of content related to rheumatology and pediatric rheumatology on these platforms [1].

Objectives: The aim of this study was to comprehensively evaluate pediatric rheumatology content on social media platforms in order to assess the popularity of relevant topics, analyze differences between posts shared by HPs versus non-HPs (NHPs) in terms of engagement, misinformation, quality, understandability, and actionability through validated scales.

Methods: Content creators, engagement metrics, purposes, sentiment, and misinformation were evaluated in the 150 most popular posts from 18 hashtags related to pediatric rheumatology on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, for a total of 450 posts each. The Journal of American Medical Association Benchmark Scale (JAMA) and the Patient Education Materials Assessment Tool for Audiovisual Materials (PEMAT-A/V) were used to assess quality, understandability and actionability in educational videos.

Results: Overall, 6723 posts were included (3130 photos, 3593 videos). The content accounted for 37.6 million interactions and 520.8 million views. The most popular hashtag was “autoimmunedisease” (309.7 million views, 24.8 million interactions) (Table 1). NHPs were the majority of creators (5160, 76.8%), mostly patients (2700, 40.2%). HPs were a minority of content creators (1563, 23.2%), with a low number of pediatric rheumatologists (142, 2.1%) and rheumatologists (124, 1.8%). Most contents were shared to report a patient (3157, 47%) experience. Content provided by patients and caregivers (3899, 58%) was analyzed for sentiment, with 34.8% reporting neutral, 34.7% positive, and 30.5% negative sentiment. Educational content (1167 photos and 907 videos) was a substantial portion of the sample (2074, 30.8%). Among educational posts, HPs provided longer (59 [IQR 85] sec vs. 50 [IQR 77] sec; p<0.001) more understandable (PEMAT-A/V 85.7 [IQR 18.9] vs. 75 [IQR 25]; p<0.001), more actionable (PEMAT-A/V 66.7 [IQR 33.3] vs. 50 [IQR 41.7]; p<0.001), and higher-quality (JAMA 3 [IQR 0] vs. 3 [IQR 1]; p<0.001) videos than NHPs. In contrast, NHPs shared more commented educational photos (3 [IQR 11] vs. 1 [IQR 8]; p<0.001) and videos (8 [IQR 50] vs. 4 [IQR 27]; p<0.001) and more viewed videos (6181 [IQR 23417] vs. 2967.5 [IQR 20943]; p=0.034) than HPs. Educational videos without misinformation were mostly provided by HPs (514 vs 313; p<0.001), as well as educational photos (568 vs 504; p<0.001) (Table 2). In educational videos, the quality was positively correlated with duration (rho 0.172; p<0.001), and negatively correlated with being NHPs (rho -0.206; p<0.001).

Conclusion: Content shared by NHPs received a higher engagement than HPs, probably likely due to the major personal involvement and interest of others with similar health issues. However, HPs created better actionable educational content than NHPs. HPs and medical organizations active in this field have the opportunity to utilize these popular communication channels to provide high-quality content and reach several patients and families living with these rare disorders.

REFERENCES: [1] La Bella S et al, J Rheumatol 2024.

Acknowledgements: NIL.

Disclosure of Interests: None declared.

© The Authors 2025. This abstract is an open access article published in Annals of Rheumatic Diseases under the CC BY-NC-ND license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ ). Neither EULAR nor the publisher make any representation as to the accuracy of the content. The authors are solely responsible for the content in their abstract including accuracy of the facts, statements, results, conclusion, citing resources etc.