The Long COVID experience from a patient's perspective: a clustering analysis of 27,216 Reddit posts.

ABSTRACT:

Objective

This work aims to study the profiles of Long COVID from the perspective of the patients spontaneously sharing their experiences and symptoms on Reddit.

Methods

We collected 27,216 posts shared between July 2020 and July 2022 on Long COVID-related Reddit forums. Natural language processing, clustering techniques and a Long COVID symptoms lexicon were used to extract the different symptoms and categories of symptoms and to study the co-occurrences and correlation between them.

Results

More than 78% of the posts mentioned at least one Long COVID symptom. Fatigue (29.4%), pain (22%), clouded consciousness (19.1%), anxiety (17.7%) and headaches (15.6%) were the most prevalent symptoms. They also highly co-occurred with a variety of other symptoms (e.g., fever, si

SUBMITTER: Ayadi H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10470115 | biostudies-literature | 2023

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature