We first manually annotated a symptom lexicon from Reddit, grouping similar symptoms and mapping each symptom expression to a standard identifier in the unified medical language system (UMLS) using the National Center for Biomedical Ontology BioPortal. We describe our methods and findings in the following sections. 23 Our objectives for this study were to extend a COVID-19 symptom lexicon built using Twitter data, deploy the extended lexicon to identify self-reported long-COVID symptoms from a specific forum on Reddit, analyze the distribution of symptoms and compare them with symptoms reported in recent studies. This study builds on our prior work on the topic, which focused on extracting self-reported COVID-19 symptoms from Twitter. 20– 23 In this study, we attempted to mine publicly available social media data from Reddit to discover and analyze the spectrum of symptoms self-reported by sufferers of long-COVID.
Studies have thus attempted to utilize this resource to answer targeted questions associated with COVID-19. 18, 19 Due to the global nature of the current COVID-19 pandemic, there is an abundance of knowledge about diverse aspects of it in publicly available social media data. 16, 17 In the past, large volumes of user-generated information on social media have been utilized by researchers to obtain early insights about health-related topics, including infectious diseases. 14, 15 Social media adoption is currently at an all-time high and continues to grow globally and in the United States. One potential source of information regarding long-COVID syndrome is social media, as many people, including healthcare professionals who had been infected with COVID-19, are reporting their experiences through this medium. 5, 9, 12, 13 Consequently, this syndrome is emerging as a critical research topic relevant to the pandemic with many ongoing studies globally. As more patients around the world continue to recover from acute COVID-19 infections, long-COVID is emerging to be a complex health problem affecting millions of people globally, and a wide range of symptoms are being discovered over time.
Covid vaccine brain fog side effect reddit full#
8– 12 However, after more than a year since the beginning of the pandemic, there are still many unknowns associated with long-COVID, including the full spectrum of symptoms that patients experience, their progression, and their long-term manifestation. 7 To date, research suggests that long-COVID symptoms may affect people of varying ages including children and those with asymptomatic acute infections. 3– 6 The phrase ‘long-COVID’ was coined by patients, many of whom initially suffered mild symptoms only to progress to complex illnesses. 3 A growing body of research is exploring long-COVID and the constellation of symptoms that patients experience following the acute phase of COVID-19 infection. Many patients continue to experience symptoms long after the acute phase of infection with the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) virus, 1, 2 and currently, the persistence of symptoms 28 days after the diagnosis of COVID-19 infection is referred to as ‘ post-acute COVID syndrome’, ‘ post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2’, ‘ long-haul COVID-19’ or ‘ long-COVID’.
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