Lee Eujin, Tsuchiya Hiroaki, Iida Hajime, Nagano Katsumasa, Murata Yoko, Maemoto Atsuo
Medical Affairs Division, Janssen Pharmaceutical K.K., Tokyo, Japan.
Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center, Sapporo Higashi Tokushukai Hospital, Sapporo, Japan.
Inflamm Intest Dis. 2024 Oct 21;9(1):283-295. doi: 10.1159/000541837. eCollection 2024 Jan-Dec.
Patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) are increasingly using online platforms to communicate with other patients and healthcare professionals seeking disease-related information and support. Free-text posts on these platforms could provide insights into patients' everyday lives, which could help improve patient care. In this proof-of-concept (POC) study, we applied text mining to extract patient needs from free-text posts on a community forum in Japan, holistically visualized the patients' perceptions and their connections, and explored the patient characteristic-dependent trends in the use of words.
Free-text posts written between May 11, 2020 and May 31, 2022 on the community forum were retrieved and subjected to text mining analysis. Trends in the use of words were extracted from the posts for correspondence and co-occurrence network analyses using KH Coder open-source text mining software.
Seventy-four posts were analyzed. Using text mining methods, we successfully extracted and visualized a variety of patient concerns and their connections. The correspondence and co-occurrence analyses revealed patient segment-dependent trends in the use of words. For example, patients with a disease duration of ≤5 years were more likely to use words related to emotions or their desire to change or quit their job, such as "anxiety" and "resignation." Patients with a disease duration of >10 years were more likely to use words showing that they are finding ways to live with or accept their disease, and are getting used to the lifestyle, but some patients continued to experience worsening disease.
We found that free-text posts on an IBD community forum can be a useful source of information to capture the wide variety of thoughts of patients. Text mining procedures can help visualize the relative importance of the topics identified from free-text posts. Our findings of this POC study will be useful for generating new hypotheses to better understand and address the needs of patients with IBD.
炎症性肠病（IBD）患者越来越多地使用在线平台与其他患者及医疗保健专业人员交流，以获取与疾病相关的信息和支持。这些平台上的自由文本帖子可以提供对患者日常生活的洞察，这有助于改善患者护理。在这项概念验证（POC）研究中，我们应用文本挖掘技术从日本一个社区论坛的自由文本帖子中提取患者需求，全面可视化患者的认知及其关联，并探索与患者特征相关的用词趋势。
检索2020年5月11日至2022年5月31日期间在该社区论坛上撰写的自由文本帖子，并进行文本挖掘分析。使用KH Coder开源文本挖掘软件从帖子中提取用词趋势，用于对应分析和共现网络分析。
共分析了74篇帖子。通过文本挖掘方法，我们成功提取并可视化了各种患者关注点及其关联。对应分析和共现分析揭示了与患者群体相关的用词趋势。例如，病程≤5年的患者更有可能使用与情绪或改变或辞去工作的愿望相关的词汇，如“焦虑”和“辞职”。病程>10年的患者更有可能使用表明他们正在寻找与疾病共存或接受疾病的方式、并已习惯这种生活方式的词汇，但仍有一些患者病情持续恶化。
我们发现IBD社区论坛上的自由文本帖子可以成为捕捉患者各种想法的有用信息来源。文本挖掘程序有助于可视化从自由文本帖子中识别出的主题的相对重要性。我们这项POC研究的结果将有助于生成新的假设，以更好地理解和满足IBD患者的需求。
