Impact of COVID-19 on multiple sclerosis topic discussion on Twitter

Impact of COVID-19 on multiple sclerosis topic discussion on Twitter

Giunti, Guido (TU Delft Applied Ergonomics and Design; University of Oulu)
Claes, Maëlick (University of Oulu)
Zubiete, Enrique Dorronzoro (University of Seville)
Rivera-Romero, Octavio (University of Seville)
Gabarron, Elia (University Hospital North Norway)

Mantas, J. (editor)

2021

Introduction: Multiple sclerosis (MS) is one of the world's most common neurologic disorders. Social media have been proposed as a way to maintain and even increase social interaction for people with MS. The objective of this work is to identify and compare the topics on Twitter during the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: Data was collected using the Twitter API between 9/2/2019 and 13/5/2020. SentiStrength was used to analyze data with the day that the pandemic was declared used as a turning point. Frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf) was used for each unigram and calculated the gains in tf-idf value. A comparative analysis of the relevance of words and categories among the datasets was performed. Results: The original dataset contained over 610k tweets, our final dataset had 147,963 tweets. After the 10th of march some categories gained relevance in positive tweets ("Healthcare professional", "Chronic conditions", "Condition burden"), while in negative tweets "Emotional aspects" became more relevant and "COVID-19" emerged as a new topic. Conclusions: Our work provides insight on how COVID-19 has changed the online discourse of people with MS.

COVID-19
Multiple Sclerosis
Sentiment Analysis
Social Media

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:52cf8653-6dd8-49ac-917d-d642663e6868

https://doi.org/10.3233/SHTI210302

IOS Press

9781643681849

Public Health and Informatics: Proceedings of MIE 2021

Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, 281

Institutional Repository

book chapter

© 2021 Guido Giunti, Maëlick Claes, Enrique Dorronzoro Zubiete, Octavio Rivera-Romero, Elia Gabarron