Fatigue, Pain, and Medication: Mining Online Posts Regarding Rheumatoid Arthritis From Reddit

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA), a chronic and systemic autoimmune disease that primarily attacks the joints around the body, is affecting a large number of people worldwide through severe symptoms and complications. Therefore, it is crucial to understand these patients' problems and support needs such that effective strategies or solutions can be made to improve their long-term treatment experience. In this paper, we present an in-depth study that is based on the structural topic model to uncover the themes and concerns in online RA posts from Reddit, an American social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website. In addition, we compared the topic prevalence differences before and after the COVID-19 pandemic to understand the impact of the pandemic on these online users. This study demonstrates the potential of using text-mining techniques on social media data to learn the treatment experiments of RA patients.