Identifying naloxone knowledge gaps on Reddit among laypersons and healthcare providers using AI

Despite being a life-saving opioid antagonist used to reverse opioid overdose, public understanding of naloxone access, use, and effects remains limited. Social media websites such as Reddit can provide unique insights into what information might be sought on naloxone in real-world contexts. Our objective was to characterize naloxone-specific information-seeking behavior on Reddit and identify knowledge gaps among two distinct querent groups: laypersons and healthcare providers. For this cross-sectional study, we collected a dataset of 11,085 original and publicly available Reddit posts from June 23, 2005, to December 31, 2023, using an artificial intelligence-assisted approach for thematic analyses. Among a subset of 376 subreddits where health-related information is discussed, posts containing naloxone-specific keywords were included in the study. We summarized knowledge gaps pertaining to naloxone, as seen from questions extracted from original posts on Reddit. We used a transformer-based question classifier to extract naloxone-related questions. Expert-guided thematic analysis was performed using a few-shot large language model (LLM) classifier to stratify the questions by underlying themes, substances of interest in addition to naloxone, and querents. We adopted a self-supervised summarization strategy using the open-source LLM Llama-3 to obtain insights into information-seeking discussions and knowledge gaps among laypersons and healthcare providers. Of 11,085 Reddit posts, 5,118 contained questions related to naloxone; 9,789 questions were extracted from 376 subreddits, across 8 overlapping themes, 6 distinct substance categories, and 3 querent classes. Drug use (36.6% of all questions) was the predominant theme observed in naloxone-related questions on Reddit, both overall as well as over time, followed by Overdose (31.1%). Healthcare providers’ questions ( N = 565; 5.8%) indicated knowledge gaps centered around naloxone administration protocols (36.8%) while laypersons’ questions ( N = 8,651; 88.3%) indicated a wider variety of knowledge gaps, including access (30.9%) and side-effects (16.5%). Knowledge gaps related to naloxone exist both among laypersons and healthcare providers. Using social media platforms such as Reddit to better understand knowledge gaps about naloxone can inform interventions needed to improve access to and use of naloxone among laypersons and healthcare providers.