Investigating Comorbidity of Mental and Physical Disorders in Online Health Forums

Abdollahyan, F. Smeraldi, R. Patel, C. Bessant, in 3rd International Conference on Applications of Intelligent Systems (APPIS20), Article 11, pp 1-5, ACM Proceedings, doi:10.1145/3378184. 3378195, January 2020

Abstract

Online health forums are increasingly used by patients to share information and discuss a broad range of health conditions. In this study, we investigate the presence of comorbidity of mental and physical disorders in users of such forums. We apply natural language processing methods to identify posts where users discuss mental health problems alongside chronic physical diseases, and use data mining techniques to explore the comorbidity patterns in these posts. We compare our findings to those reported in the literature and show how the results obtained are correlated with real-life events.

Keywords:

health informatics; data mining; natural language processing.

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