Analysis of mental and physical disorders associated with COVID-19 in online health forums: a natural language processing study.
BMJ Open
; 11(11): e056601, 2021 11 05.
Article
in English
| MEDLINE | ID: covidwho-1504533
ABSTRACT
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 ANDDESIGN:
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 OUTCOMEMEASURES:
(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.Keywords
Full text:
Available
Collection:
International databases
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Social Media
/
COVID-19
Type of study:
Prognostic study
/
Reviews
Limits:
Humans
Language:
English
Journal:
BMJ Open
Year:
2021
Document Type:
Article
Affiliation country:
Bmjopen-2021-056601
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