JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Gastrointestinal (GI) discomfort is prevalent and known to be associated with impaired quality of life. Real-world information on factors of GI discomfort and solutions used by patients is however limited. Social media, including web forums, have been considered as a new source of information to examine the health of populations in real life setting.

Objective:

The objectives of this retrospective infodemiology study were to identify discussions topics, characterize users and identify perceived determinants of GI discomfort in online messages posted by users of French social media.

Methods:

Messages related to GI discomfort posted between January 2003 and August 2018 were extracted from fourteen French-speaking general and specialized publicly available web forums. Extracted messages were cleaned, deidentified and relevant medical concepts were determined based on the Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities (MedDRA) and vernacular terms. Identification of discussion topics was performed by using a correlated topic model based on the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). A non-supervised clustering algorithm was applied to cluster web forum users according to the reported symptoms of GI discomfort, discussed topics and activity on web forums. Users’ age and gender were determined by linear regression and application of a Support Vector Machine, respectively, to characterize the identified clusters according to demographic parameters. Perceived factors of GI discomfort were classified by a combined method based on (i) syntactic analysis to identify messages with causality terms and (ii) a second topic modeling in relevant segment of phrases.

Results:

198 866 messages related to GI discomfort were included in the analysis corpus after extraction and cleaning. These messages were posted by 36 989 separate web users, most of them being women under 40 years old. Everyday life, diet, digestion, abdominal pain, impact on quality of life and tips to manage stress were among the most discussed topics. Segmentation of users identified five clusters corresponding to chronic and acute GI conditions. Diet topic was associated with each cluster, and stress was strongly associated with abdominal pain. Psychological factors, food and allergens were perceived as the main causes of GI discomfort by web users.

Conclusions:

GI discomfort is an actively discussed topic by web users. This study revealed a complex relationship between food, stress and GI discomfort. Our approach has shown that identifying online discussion topics associated with GI discomfort and its perceived factors is feasible and can serve as a complementary source of real-world evidence for caregivers. Clinical Trial: Not applicable (not a trial)