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Background: Suicide is a leading cause of death in the United States. Social media such as Twitter is an emerging surveillance tool that may assist researchers in tracking suicide risk factors in real time., Aims: To identify suicide-related risk factors through Twitter conversations by matching on geographic suicide rates from vital statistics data., Method: At-risk tweets were filtered from the Twitter stream using keywords and phrases created from suicide risk factors. Tweets were grouped by state and departures from expectation were calculated. The values for suicide tweeters were compared against national data of actual suicide rates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention., Results: A total of 1,659,274 tweets were analyzed over a 3-month period with 37,717 identified as at-risk for suicide. Midwestern and western states had a higher proportion of suicide-related tweeters than expected, while the reverse was true for southern and eastern states. A strong correlation was observed between state Twitter-derived data and actual state age-adjusted suicide data., Conclusion: Twitter may be a viable tool for real-time monitoring of suicide risk factors on a large scale. This study demonstrates that individuals who are at risk for suicide may be detected through social media.

Background: Adderall is the most commonly abused prescription stimulant among college students. Social media provides a real-time avenue for monitoring public health, specifically for this population., Objective: This study explores discussion of Adderall on Twitter to identify variations in volume around college exam periods, differences across sets of colleges and universities, and commonly mentioned side effects and co-ingested substances., Methods: Public-facing Twitter status messages containing the term "Adderall" were monitored from November 2011 to May 2012. Tweets were examined for mention of side effects and other commonly abused substances. Tweets from likely students containing GPS data were identified with clusters of nearby colleges and universities for regional comparison., Results: 213,633 tweets from 132,099 unique user accounts mentioned "Adderall." The number of Adderall tweets peaked during traditional college and university final exam periods. Rates of Adderall tweeters were highest among college and university clusters in the northeast and south regions of the United States. 27,473 (12.9%) mentioned an alternative motive (eg, study aid) in the same tweet. The most common substances mentioned with Adderall were alcohol (4.8%) and stimulants (4.7%), and the most common side effects were sleep deprivation (5.0%) and loss of appetite (2.6%)., Conclusions: Twitter posts confirm the use of Adderall as a study aid among college students. Adderall discussions through social media such as Twitter may contribute to normative behavior regarding its abuse.

Placental/umbilical cord blood (PCB) is a source of hematopoietic stem cells for bone marrow reconstitution. Engraftment speed and survival are related to the total nucleated cell (TNC) dose of the graft. This study explored the possible influence on engraftment of nucleated red blood cells (NRBCs) in the graft. Automated hematology analyzers were used to enumerate TNCs. NRBCs were counted by visual examination or by using an automated analyzer. Hematopoietic progenitor cells were enumerated as either colony-forming cells or CD34(+) cells. Transplant centers reported on transplant outcome in 1112 patients given PCB grafts through September 2001. NRBCs correlated with progenitor cell numbers. Both white blood cell and NRBC dose were independently predictive of myeloid engraftment speed. Because NRBC dose predicted engraftment speed, inclusion of NRBCs in the TNC count does not reduce the effectiveness of the prefreezing TNC count as an index of the quality of a PCB unit as a graft. The correlation between the number of NRBCs and the number of hematopoietic progenitor cells probably reflects the involvement of early stem cells in erythroid responses.