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Scientific Oral Presentations

Head and Neck Surgery

Session: Scientific Oral Presentations 4 - Head and Neck Surgery

HPV Vaccination-Related Online Discourse and Search Trends Following the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Head and Neck Cancer Prevention Recommendation

Sunday, September 29, 2024
1:18 PM – 1:24 PM EDT
Location: MBCC, 208
Disclosure(s):
Christopher C. Tseng, MD:

faculty for this accredited education activity has no relationship(s) with ineligible companies to disclose.

Neerav Goyal, MD, MPH:

faculty for this accredited education activity has no relationship(s) with ineligible companies to disclose.

Introduction: In 2020, the FDA approved Merck’s GARDASIL 9 for prevention of certain HPV-related head and neck cancers. This study characterizes the sentiment and themes of online discourse regarding the HPV vaccination in the period surrounding the 2020 FDA recommendation.

Methods: Online public discourse was assessed by searching Reddit for user submitted posts with the relevant keywords. Reddit posts were categorized as personal, facts-based, or conspiracy discussion by a trained machine learning classifier. Natural language processing was applied to calculate positive and negative text sentiment, polarity scores, and frequently occurring non-stopwords. Relative search popularity was extracted from Google Trends for the same relevant keywords. Vaccination data for adolescents 13-17 were extracted from the CDC’s Teen VaxView database. Data were extracted for 2018-22 and descriptive and regression analyses were conducted in R.

Results: Analysis of 2,758 Reddit posts demonstrated a balanced overall positive/negative sentiment among user posts, with a significant positive trend over the study period (p = 0.01). Most posts were personal stories or questions (n = 1997, 72.6%) and discussion themes centered on describing the vaccine through thoughts and facts (55%). Discussion including head and neck terms significantly increased over the study period (p = 0.01). There was a significant upward trend in HPV searches the study period (p < 0.05). Vaccination coverage trended upwards significantly for males and females (p < 0.01 for all). Significant relationships were found between positive sentiment trend and vaccination coverage (p = 0.02).

Conclusions: Discourse surrounding the HPV vaccine has been increasingly positive in sentiment and changes in FDA guidelines correlated with increased mention of head and neck cancer within HPV vaccination discourse. There was a concurrent increase in vaccination rate among adolescents. Understanding public sentiment and vaccination trends is vital to resource allocation and strategies that can be used to educate patients.

    Presenting Author(s)

  • Andrew V. Meci, MPH

    Medical Student
    Department of Otolaryngology- Head and Neck Surgery, Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center
    State College, Pennsylvania, United States

    Disclosure information not submitted.

    • Co-Author(s)

  • Christopher C. Tseng, MD

    Resident Physician
    Penn State Health
    Hershey, PA, United States

    Disclosure(s):

    faculty for this accredited education activity has no relationship(s) with ineligible companies to disclose.

  • ZJ

    Zachary Jensen

    Penn State College of Medicine, United States

    Disclosure information not submitted.

    • Senior Author(s)

  • Neerav Goyal, MD, MPH

    Associate Professor; Division Chief Head and Neck Surgery; Vice Chair Patient Safety and Quality
    Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center
    Hershey, Pennsylvania, United States

    Disclosure(s):

    faculty for this accredited education activity has no relationship(s) with ineligible companies to disclose.