Natural language processing of online support group postings reveals patients' perspectives on strategies for managing psoriasis
Psoriasis is a chronic skin disorder, and patients encounter high physical and psychosocial burdens. Social media forums feature extensive patient-generated comments. We hypothesized that analyzing patient-posted comments using natural language processing would provide insights into patient engageme...
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| Published in | Dermatology reports Vol. 16; no. 1; p. 9824 |
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| Main Authors | , , , , |
| Format | Journal Article |
| Language | English |
| Published |
Italy
PAGEPress Publications, Pavia, Italy
12.03.2024
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| Subjects | |
| Online Access | Get full text |
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| Summary: | Psoriasis is a chronic skin disorder, and patients encounter high physical and psychosocial burdens. Social media forums feature extensive patient-generated comments. We hypothesized that analyzing patient-posted comments using natural language processing would provide insights into patient engagements, sentiments, concerns, and support, which are vital for the holistic management of psoriasis. We collected 32,000 active user comments posted on Reddit. We applied Latent Dirichlet Allocation to categorize posts into popular topics and employed spectral clustering to establish cohesive themes and word representation frequency within these topics. We sorted posts into 29 significant topics of discussion and categorized them into four categories: management (37.48%), emotion (21.57%), presentation (19.79%), and others (3.57%). The frequent posts on management were diet (7.23%), biologics (6.95%), and adverse effects (3.88%). The emotion category comprised negative sentiments (11.02%), encouragement (5.49%), and gratitude (5.06%). The presentation topic included a discussion of scalp (5.69%), flare-timing (3.63%), and arthritis (2.64%). Others comprised differential diagnosis (5.01%), leaky gut (4.12%), and referrals (3.70%). This study identified patients' experiences and perspectives associated with psoriasis, which should be considered to tailor support systems to improve their quality of life. |
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| Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 Conference presentation: the preliminary data from this work was presented at the 2022 American Academy of Dermatology Annual Meeting held on March 25-29 in Boston, USA. The conference abstract was published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology. 2022;87(3):AB140. doi:10.1016/j.jaad.2022.06.592. Ethical approval and consent to participate: as the analysis was performed on data extracted from a publicly accessible forum, this study was exempt from obtaining informed consent and institutional review board approval. Publisher's note: all claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher. Contributions: KR, conceptualized and designed the study, carried out the analyses, drafted the initial manuscript, and revised the manuscript; PMJ, NJL, JQ, intellectual content, review and revision of the manuscript; OM, computation, and analysis of data. All the authors approved the final version to be published. Conflict of interest: the authors declare no potential conflict of interest. Availability of data and material: the datasets generated and analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. |
| ISSN: | 2036-7392 2036-7406 |
| DOI: | 10.4081/dr.2023.9824 |