JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) ranks high in global mortality, and COVID-19 intensifies its challenges. Apart from obvious physical impacts, the long-term psychological effects of COVID-19 are not fully understood.

Objective:

This study aims to unveil the long-term psychological trends and patterns of the COPD population throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond via large-scale Twitter mining.

Methods:

A two-stage deep learning framework was designed in this study. The first stage involves a data retrieval procedure to identify COPD and non-COPD users and collect their daily tweets. In the second stage, a data mining procedure leverages various deep learning algorithms to extract demographic characteristics, hashtags, topics, and sentiments from the collected tweets. Based on these data, multiple analytical methods, including odds ratio (OR), difference-in-difference (DiD), and sentiment component methods, were used to examine the psychological effects.

Results:

A cohort of 15,347 COPD users was identified from our self-collected Twitter database. The attentiveness towards COPD was significantly affected by gender, age, and occupation. It’s lower in females (OR: 0.91 [0.87-0.94]; p<0.0001) than males, higher in seniors aged 40 and above (OR: 7.23 [6.95-7.52]; p<0.0001) than those under 40, and higher in individuals with lower socioeconomic status (OR: 1.66 [1.60-1.72]; p<0.0001) than those with higher socioeconomic status. Across the study duration, COPD users showed decreasing concerns for COVID-19 and increasing health-related concerns. After the middle phase of COVID-19 (July 2021), a distinct decrease in sentiments among COPD users contrasted sharply with the upward trend among non-COPD users. Notably, in the post-COVID era (June 2023), COPD users showed reduced levels of joy and trust, and increased levels of fear compared to the middle phase of COVID-19. Moreover, males, seniors, and individuals with lower socioeconomic status exhibited heightened fear compared to their counterparts.

Conclusions:

The results of our data analysis suggest that the COPD population experiences heightened mental stress in the post-COVID era. This underscores the importance of developing tailored interventions and support systems that account for diverse population characteristics.