Abstract
Background: The existing research on adolescents’ irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is helpful towards understanding the pathophysiology of the disease, and the etiology of abdominal functional pain, food induced gastrointestinal symptoms, and other dietary consequences. But not much is known about complications that arise from the symptoms and everyday management of IBS among childhood and adolescence.
Objective: As adolescents with IBS are increasingly sharing information about their symptoms in online healthcare forums, this study aims to analyze their posts and those from their parents and discover medical insights that can be used by doctors, patients, and caregivers to manage IBS symptoms in adolescents.
Methods: After mining the longitudinal data from IBSgroup.org, we analyzed all the posts (over 750 topics and 3400 replies) from adolescents with IBS aged 13-17 and parents having children with IBS in the IBSgroup.org forum. We first detect six main topics each for both parents’ posts and teens’ posts. Then a social network analysis was performed to gain insights on the nature of the patients’ online interaction patterns.
Results: Both the adolescents and parents gain social support from the online platform. While parents are more anxious about the pathology of IBS, the adolescents worry more about its effect on their everyday activities and social lives. Topic modeling shows that IBS affects teens most in the areas of pain and school performance. Further, the issues raised by parents suggest that girls be bothered more by school performance over pain, while boys show exactly the opposite – pain is of greater concern than school performance.
Conclusions: The study is the first attempt to leverage machine learning approaches and social network analysis to find top IBS concerns from the perspectives of children, adolescents and caregivers. Adolescents with IBS suffer physical pain and are deeply disturbed by social influences and anxiety due to the symptoms. Boys and girls are affected differently by pain and school performance, whose views on the effects differ from parents’.
Objective: As adolescents with IBS are increasingly sharing information about their symptoms in online healthcare forums, this study aims to analyze their posts and those from their parents and discover medical insights that can be used by doctors, patients, and caregivers to manage IBS symptoms in adolescents.
Methods: After mining the longitudinal data from IBSgroup.org, we analyzed all the posts (over 750 topics and 3400 replies) from adolescents with IBS aged 13-17 and parents having children with IBS in the IBSgroup.org forum. We first detect six main topics each for both parents’ posts and teens’ posts. Then a social network analysis was performed to gain insights on the nature of the patients’ online interaction patterns.
Results: Both the adolescents and parents gain social support from the online platform. While parents are more anxious about the pathology of IBS, the adolescents worry more about its effect on their everyday activities and social lives. Topic modeling shows that IBS affects teens most in the areas of pain and school performance. Further, the issues raised by parents suggest that girls be bothered more by school performance over pain, while boys show exactly the opposite – pain is of greater concern than school performance.
Conclusions: The study is the first attempt to leverage machine learning approaches and social network analysis to find top IBS concerns from the perspectives of children, adolescents and caregivers. Adolescents with IBS suffer physical pain and are deeply disturbed by social influences and anxiety due to the symptoms. Boys and girls are affected differently by pain and school performance, whose views on the effects differ from parents’.
| Original language | English |
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| Publisher | JMIR Publications Inc. |
| Number of pages | 31 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 31 Dec 2020 |
Publication series
| Name | JMIR Preprints |
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