Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jul 29, 2019
Date Accepted: Oct 20, 2019
Health Effects Associated with Electronic Cigarette Use: Automated Mining of Online Forums
ABSTRACT
Background:
Our previous infodemiological study was performed by manually mining health-effect data associated with electronic cigarette (EC) from online forums. Manually mining is time consuming and limits the number of posts that can be retrieved.
Objective:
Our goal in the current study was to automatically extract and analyze a large number (>41,000) of online forum posts related to the health effects associated with EC use between 2008-2015.
Methods:
Data were annotated with medical concepts from the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) using a modified version of the MetaMap tool. Of over 1.4 million posts, 41,216 were used to analyze symptoms (undiagnosed conditions) and disorders (physician diagnosed terminology) associated with EC use. For each post, sentiment (positive, negative, and neutral) was also assigned.
Results:
Symptom and disorder data were categorized into 12 organ systems/anatomical regions. Most posts for symptoms and disorders contained negative sentiment, and affected systems were similar across all years. Health effects were reported most often in the neurological, mouth and throat, and respiratory systems. The most frequently reported symptoms and disorders were headache (N=939), coughing (N=852), malaise (N=468), asthma (N=916), dehydration (N=803) and pharyngitis (N=565). Additionally, users often reported linked symptoms (e.g., coughing and headache).
Conclusions:
Online forums are a valuable repository of data that can be used to identify positive and negative health effects associated with EC use. By automating extraction of online information, we obtained more data than in our prior study, identified new symptoms and disorders associated with EC use, determined which systems are most frequently adversely affected, identified specific symptoms and disorders most commonly reported, and tracked health effects over 7 years.
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