Sentiment Analysis Surrounding Blepharoplasty in Online Health Forums
Related Experiment Video
Updated: Sep 25, 2025

Using a 1064-nm Picosecond Neodymium-Doped Yttrium Aluminum Garnet Laser for Periorbital Hyperpigmentation
Published on: May 23, 2025
Tracy J Lu1, Anne Xuan-Lan Nguyen2, Xuan-Vi Trinh3
1Department of Ophthalmology, Byers Eye Institute, Stanford University, Palo Alto, Calif.
Background:
Upper and lower blepharoplasty are among the most common procedures in aesthetic surgery and are often emotionally laden due to the subjective nature of outcomes and implications with beauty and self-identity. This article capitalizes on the increasing wealth of patient-provided health information online and is the first to analyze the emotions surrounding blepharoplasty discussions in an open internet health forum, MedHelp.
Methods:
We used Python to scrape MedHelp for threads that contained "blepharoplasty" and then used IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding to perform sentiment analyses, calculating a general sentiment score (-1 to +1) as well as emotion scores for anger, sadness, joy, fear, and disgust (0 to 1) for posts and keywords contained within the posts. Keywords were then manually grouped into five distinct clinical categories: symptoms, doctor, treatment, medication, and body.
Results:
We collected 52 threads containing "blepharoplasty," yielding 154 posts and 1365 keywords. The average sentiment score was negative among all posts (-0.15) and keywords (-0.30). Among all posts and keywords, sadness had the highest score and disgust had the lowest score.
Conclusions:
Fear and sadness are the predominant emotions for blepharoplasty patients online, and the most negative symptoms cited are not ones that surgeons typically expect.
Related Concept Videos
Angle Closure Glaucoma: Treatment
Accessory Structures of the Eye
Open Angle Glaucoma: Treatment
Drugs such as carbonic anhydrase inhibitors, α2- and...
Muscles of the Eye
Extraocular Muscles
The six extraocular muscles surround the eyeball and control its movements. They are responsible for a wide range of eye motions, including looking up, down, left, right, and...
Assessment of Airway, Skin Color, and Use of Accessory Muscles
Introduction
The initial evaluation of a patient's respiratory system...
