Long COVID symptoms from Reddit: Characterizing post-COVID syndrome from patient reports
Abstract
Objective
To mine Reddit to discover long-COVID symptoms self-reported by users, compare symptom distributions across studies, and create a symptom lexicon.
Materials and Methods
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.
Results
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%) amongst 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.
Conclusion
The spectrum of symptoms identified from Reddit may provide early insights about long-COVID.
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