Detecting Signals of Associations between Dietary Supplement Use and Mental Disorders from Twitter

In this study, we attempted to detect signals of association between dietary supplement use and mental disorders from Twitter. We collected tweets ranging from 2016 to 2017 which mention five dietary supplements. A case cohort of 257 users were identified by adapting a natural language processing method with further manually verified to have taken one supplement. We then randomly selected 257 users who had not taken any dietary supplement as the control cohort and compared the sentiment and mental health signals of their tweets to the case cohort. We have observed significant differences in the sad, anxious, and negative sentiment between the two cohorts. These results have shown that Twitter is a potential source for detecting signals of association between dietary supplement use and anxiety disorders, depression, and mood disorders.