Study finds students tweet about Adderall. A lot

A recent study performed at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, examined the tweets of college students across the USA for mentions of the pharmaceutical drug Adderall.Twitter, to most students, is a 140-character social media platform where they can freely express the stresses of college, frustrations and opinions.Yet Twitter also has become a platform for studying the abuse of pharmaceutical drugs among those students.A recent study performed at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, examined the tweets of college students across the USA for mentions of the pharmaceutical drug Adderall.The drug has become increasingly more common among students looking to increase concentration and production during "crunch times" such as midterms and finals week.A total of 213,633 tweets from 132,099 unique users mentioned the drug between November 2011 and May 2012. Mentions peaked during final exam periods nationwide and were higher in the Northeast and southern regions of the USA.With 26% of Internet users between 18-29 on Twitter, researchers from Brigham Young considered the social media platform to be a representative population sample of college students. After narrowing these users to those actually in college, researchers began sifting through thousands of tweets.They found tweets such as: "I need Adderall. Can't focus on studying or finishing these reviews", "Does anyone have Adderall? #desperate" and "We would all graduate with a 4.0 if Adderall was sold ov...
Source: PharmaGossip - Category: Pharma Commentators Authors: Source Type: blogs