Concerns among people who use opioids during the COVID-19 pandemic: a natural language processing analysis of social media posts.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Timely data from official sources regarding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on people who use prescription and illegal opioids is lacking. We conducted a large-scale, natural language processing (NLP) analysis of conversations on opioid-related drug forums to better understand concerns among people who use opioids.

Methods

In this retrospective observational study, we analyzed posts from 14 opioid-related forums on the social network Reddit. We applied NLP to identify frequently mentioned substances and phrases, and grouped the phrases manually based on their contents into three broad key themes: (i) prescription and/or illegal opioid use; (ii) substance use disorder treatment access and care; and (iii) withdrawal. Phrases that were unmappable to any particula

SUBMITTER: Sarker A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8897722 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature