Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: Diabetes is a disease affecting quality of life of millions of persons worldwide. Instagram is one of the most successful social media network. It influences, via its posts, thoughts, emotions and decision making of many topics, including health related ones. The aim of this review to analyse the emotional sharing content of diabetes related posts in Instagram.

Methods: An Instagram query using the search term “diabetes” in arab language was performed between the 13th and th 23th January 2023. The first 10 posts appearing everyday of the study were included in the analysis. The publishing profiles, the nature and the content were assessed.

Results: 70% of the overall diabetes related videos had emotional sharing content. Posts containing emotions sharing content had on average 932 likes and 132 commentaries; those with information sharing had 852 and 50, respectively. 32% of the videos shared positive emotions; it included mainly describing “success stories” of people living with diabetes, and “deculpabilisation” of diabetics. 7% contained negative emotions, mainly expressing difficulty of living with diabetes, and the insulin daily injection burden. 61% had neutral emotional content, mainly experiences sharing. 58% of positive emotions sharing was posted by diabetics profiles, and 15% by health professionnals.

Conclusion: The emotional sharing posts are popular among diabetes related content in Instagram. The posts published by diabetics had more positive percentage than other sharing profiles, and thus may be useful to help the diabetics improve their perception of their disease.