Abstract

Background: The 2021 purchase of the respiratory pharmaceutical company Vectura by Phillip Morris International was approved with little input from the patient community.  The COPD Foundation, along with global partners, surveyed people with chronic respiratory disease to get their perspective.  We report the results of free text responses to the question “In your own words, what is your opinion of tobacco companies owning companies that are earning money from inhalers and/or medications for lung conditions?”

Methods: Respondents were recruited via international online community and social media outlets between February 9-15, 2022. Responses (765) were analyzed for identifying underlying themes and topics and sentiment in the data using SAS® Visual Text Analytics software (Figure). The “Sentiment” node in the software produced a word / phrase list that was then fed back into categories node with additional modifications using Boolean linguistic rules to remove false positives for positive, negative, and neutral emotions categories.

Results: Of 475 text responses that included sentiment, 371 (78%) expressed negative sentiment.

Conclusion: Sentiment analysis highlights the anger and frustration felt by people using inhaled medications who care about who profits from therapies used to treat their diseases.