JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is a chronic autoimmune inflammatory disease affecting various organs with a wide range of clinical manifestations. Cutaneous lupus erythematosus (CLE) can manifest as a feature of SLE or an independent skin ailment. Health-related quality of life (HRQoL) is frequently compromised in individuals living with lupus. Understanding patients’ perspectives when living with a disease is crucial for effectively meeting their unmet needs. Social listening is a promising new method that can provide insights into patients’ experiences living with their disease (lupus) and leverage these insights to inform drug development strategies for addressing their unmet needs.

Objective:

To explore patients’ experience of living with SLE and CLE, including their disease and treatment experiences, HRQoL and unmet needs, as discussed online in social media platforms such as blogs and forums.

Methods:

We conducted a retrospective exploratory social listening study across thirteen publicly available English-language social media platforms from October 2019 to January 2022. Data were processed using natural language processing and knowledge graph tagging technology to clean, format, anonymize, and annotate them algorithmically before feeding them to Pharos®, a Semalytix proprietary data visualization and analysis platform, for further analysis. Pharos® was used to generate descriptive data statistics, providing insights into the magnitude of individual patient experience variables, their differences in the magnitude of variables, and the associations between algorithmically tagged variables.

Results:

A total of 45554 posts from 3834 individuals who were algorithmically identified as patients with lupus were included in this study. Among them, 1925 (authoring 5636 posts) and 106 (authoring 243 posts) patients were identified as having SLE and CLE, respectively. Patients frequently mentioned various symptoms in relation to SLE and CLE including pain, fatigue, and rashes; pain and fatigue were identified as the main drivers of HRQoL impairment. The most affected aspects of HRQoL included “Mobility,” “Cognitive Capabilities,” “Recreation and Leisure,” and “Sleep and Rest”. Existing pharmacological interventions poorly managed the most burdensome symptoms of lupus. Conversely, non-pharmacological treatments, such as exercise and meditation, were frequently associated with HRQoL improvement.

Conclusions:

Patients with lupus reported a complex interplay of symptoms and HRQoL aspects that negatively influenced one another. This study demonstrates that social listening is an effective method to gather insights into patients’ experiences, preferences, and unmet needs, which can be considered during the drug development process to develop effective therapies and improve disease management.