Analysis of mental and physical disorders associated with COVID-19 in online health forums: a natural language processing study
| Autor: | Rashmi Patel, Jessica Irving, Fabrizio Smeraldi, Maryam Abdollahyan, Conrad Bessant |
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| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2021 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | BMJ Open, Vol 11, Iss 11 (2021) |
| Druh dokumentu: | article |
| ISSN: | 2021-0566 2044-6055 |
| DOI: | 10.1136/bmjopen-2021-056601 |
| Popis: | Objectives Online health forums provide rich and untapped real-time data on population health. Through novel data extraction and natural language processing (NLP) techniques, we characterise the evolution of mental and physical health concerns relating to the COVID-19 pandemic among online health forum users.Setting and design We obtained data from three leading online health forums: HealthBoards, Inspire and HealthUnlocked, from the period 1 January 2020 to 31 May 2020. Using NLP, we analysed the content of posts related to COVID-19.Primary outcome measures (1) Proportion of forum posts containing COVID-19 keywords; (2) proportion of forum users making their very first post about COVID-19; (3) proportion of COVID-19-related posts containing content related to physical and mental health comorbidities.Results Data from 739 434 posts created by 53 134 unique users were analysed. A total of 35 581 posts (4.8%) contained a COVID-19 keyword. Posts discussing COVID-19 and related comorbid disorders spiked in early March to mid-March around the time of global implementation of lockdowns prompting a large number of users to post on online health forums for the first time. Over a quarter of COVID-19-related thread titles mentioned a physical or mental health comorbidity.Conclusions We demonstrate that it is feasible to characterise the content of online health forum user posts regarding COVID-19 and measure changes over time. The pandemic and corresponding public response has had a significant impact on posters’ queries regarding mental health. Social media data sources such as online health forums can be harnessed to strengthen population-level mental health surveillance. |
| Databáze: | Directory of Open Access Journals |
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