Mining Long-COVID Symptoms From Reddit: Characterizing Post ...

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Abstract

Our objective was to mine Reddit to discover long-COVID symptoms self-reported by users, compare symptom distributions across studies, and create a symptom lexicon. We retrieved posts from the /r/covidlonghaulers subreddit and extracted symptoms via approximate matching using an expanded meta-lexicon. We mapped the extracted symptoms to standard concept IDs, compared their distributions with those reported in recent literature and analyzed their distributions over time. From 42 995 posts by 4249 users, we identified 1744 users who expressed at least 1 symptom. The most frequently reported long-COVID symptoms were mental health-related symptoms (55.2%), fatigue (51.2%), general ache/pain (48.4%), brain fog/confusion (32.8%), and dyspnea (28.9%) among users reporting at least 1 symptom. Comparison with recent literature revealed a large variance in reported symptoms across studies. Temporal analysis showed several persistent symptoms up to 15 months after infection. The spectrum of symptoms identified from Reddit may provide early insights about long-COVID.

Keywords: COVID-19; natural language processing; post-acute COVID-19 syndrome; social media; virus diseases.

© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Medical Informatics Association.

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Figures

Figure 1.

Distribution of numbers of long-COVID…

Figure 1.

Distribution of numbers of long-COVID symptoms reported by Reddit users in the r/covidlonghaulers …

Figure 2.

( A ) Number of…

Figure 2.

( A ) Number of users reporting each of the top 20 symptoms…

Figure 3.

Heatmap of relative frequencies of…

Figure 3.

Heatmap of relative frequencies of symptoms from months 3 to 15.

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