Twitter Based Social Support for Hispanic and Black Dementia Caregivers (Tweet-S2)

Columbia University

Status: Completed

Conditions: Emotional Stress; Loneliness

Treatments: Behavioral: Twitter for Hispanic caregivers; Behavioral: Twitter for African American caregivers

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other; Other U.S. Federal agency; NIH

Identifiers

NCT03865498

R01AG060929-01 (U.S. NIH Grant/Contract)

AAAS3305

Details and patient eligibility

About

The prevalence of dementia is higher in Hispanics and African Americans than non-Hispanic Whites. Moreover, dementia caregivers often experience loneliness as well decreased health status. The expansion of social media use among Hispanics and African Americans, particularly Twitter - a short message service - offers great promise for improving social support. This study aims to evaluate changes of discussion topics, sentiment and networking styles (i.e., number of followers) among anonymous followers of our two Twitter networks; the African American/Black dementia caregiver group and the Hispanic dementia caregiver group.

Full description

The study will utilize Twitter networks to post a daily message for dementia caregivers for a year, and set up a monthly group chat.

Enrollment: 966 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18+ years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• 18 years of age or older
• Black or Hispanic, living in the U.S. including the U.S. territories
• a dementia caregiver with any duration, able to speak English or Spanish/bilingual
• must agree to terms of conditions of use and privacy policy and rules of one of the two dementia caregiver network (Hispanic @dcnh, Black @dcnaab), the Twitter user agreement of the terms of service, Twitter privacy policy and Twitter rules including intellectual property, violence, misconduct, abuse behavior, private information and spam and security
• use a smartphone or a feature phone (i.e., a cell phone with text messaging)

Exclusion criteria

• do not have de-identified Twitter account, children, not a dementia family caregiver

Trial design

Primary purpose: Supportive Care

Allocation: Non-Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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966 participants in 2 patient groups

Hispanic dementia caregivers

Experimental group

Description:

De-identified followers of our Hispanic dementia caregiver Twitter network will receive messages from the network (Twitter for Hispanic caregivers' intervention).

Treatment:

Behavioral: Twitter for Hispanic caregivers

African American dementia caregivers

Experimental group

Description:

De-identified followers of our African American dementia caregiver Twitter network will receive messages from the network (Twitter for African American caregivers' intervention).

Treatment:

Behavioral: Twitter for African American caregivers