BACKGROUND
Diabetic patients with poor education about the disease may exhibit poor compliance and thus subsequently experience more complications. However, the conceptual gap between the diabetes education provided by health providers and the non-compliance of patients is still not well understood in the real world.
OBJECTIVE
Disclosing what people think about diabetes on social media may help to close this gap.
METHODS
In this study, social media data was collected from the OpView social media platform. After checking the quality of the data, we analyzed the trends in people’s discussions on the Internet using text mining. The natural language process, including word segmentation, and word count, and counting the relationships between the words. A word cloud is developed, and a clustering analyses are also performed.
RESULTS
There were 19,565 posts about diabetes collected from forums, community websites, and Q&A websites in 2017. The three most popular aspects of diabetes were diet (33.2%), life adjustment (21.2%), and avoiding complications (15.6%). Most of the discussions about diabetes were negative, and the top three negative ratios aspects were avoiding complications (7.60), problem-solving (4.08) and exercise (3.97). In terms of diet, the most popular topics were Chinese medicine and special diet therapy. In terms of life adjustment, financial issues, weight reduction, and a less painful glucometer were discussed the most. Furthermore, sexual dysfunction, neuropathy, nephropathy, and retinopathy were the most worrying issues in the avoiding complications area. Using text mining, we found that people care most about sexual dysfunction. Health providers care about the benefits of exercise in diabetes care, but people are mostly really concerned about sexual functioning.
CONCLUSIONS
A conceptual gap between health providers and diabetes patients existed in this real-world social media investigation. To spread healthy diabetic education concepts in the media, health providers might wish to provide more information related to patients actual areas of concern, such as sexual function, Chinese medicine, and weight reduction.