Background

Quality of life (QoL) strongly influences decisions in canine oncology, yet veterinarians may struggle to anticipate owner priorities. Understanding how owners conceptualize QoL may support communication, referral, and treatment planning.

Hypothesis/Objectives

To characterize how owners discuss QoL during cancer care using social media data.

Animals

Public posts authored by owners discussing cancer.

Methods

An observational social media listening study was conducted. Posts referencing canine cancer were collected using keyword queries across Reddit, X, blogs, forums over two years, and Facebook, Threads, YouTube over 41 days. Posts were filtered for relevance using a zero-shot large language model (precision >98%) to retain owner-authored content and exclude identifiable veterinary professional posts. Sentiment and emotion analysis, thematic extraction, and non-negative matrix factorization topic modeling were applied, with focused analyses of QoL- and referral-related content.

Results

Of 28,784 posts, 11,878 were analyzed. Sentiment was predominantly negative (66%), with sadness the dominant emotion (64%). QoL was a cross-cutting theme influencing decisions, with owners weighing comfort, functional decline, and emotional well-being against treatment burden and cost. Referral-related posts (n=341) reflected uncertainty regarding specialist care timing and benefit, framed around anticipated QoL. Topic modeling demonstrated consistent co-occurrence of QoL with corticosteroid use, chemotherapy tolerance, and palliative intent, particularly during prognostic uncertainty or poor prognosis.

Conclusions

Online discourse indicates QoL is the primary lens for evaluating cancer treatment decisions of dog owners. Explicit QoL-centered conversations, including palliative options and treatments likely to enhance QoL, may improve shared decision-making, referral satisfaction, and client trust in veterinary oncology care.