in_reply_to_user_id failing for IDs greater than 32 bit - causes cron to fail

Twitter module cron import recently failed on one of our sites and when I debugged I found that the in_reply_to_user_id was a negative value. Because the database field is unsigned this was resulting in a PDO exception.

I believe this is related to this issue https://drupal.org/node/491794

For some reason the row for insertion into the twitter table is created as follows:

$row = array(
'twitter_id' => $status->id,
'screen_name' => $status->user->screen_name,
'created_time' => strtotime($status->created_at),
'text' => $status->text,
'source' => $status->source,
'in_reply_to_status_id' => ($status->in_reply_to_status_id > 0) ? (string) $status->in_reply_to_status_id : NULL,
// ISSUE HERE
'in_reply_to_user_id' => (int) $status->in_reply_to_user_id,
'in_reply_to_screen_name' => $status->in_reply_to_screen_name,
'truncated' => (int) $status->truncated,
);

The 'in_reply_to_user_id' value is being converted to an int. By changing that line to

'in_reply_to_user_id' => $status->in_reply_to_user_id,

everything works fine, cron runs, the correct ID gets inserted and all is well.

My concern is why this value is being converted to an int in the first place. Will something break as a result of me making this change? If not, then this should be applied as a patch, because all > 32bit IDs will cause cron to fail at that point.

Thanks,
Hawasha