Four Things People Should Know About Migraines
Mohammad S. Parsa, Lukasz Golab
TL;DR
Public understanding of migraines is often insufficient, impacting quality of life. The authors analyze Reddit discussions (Sept 2015–Sept 2021) with a semantics-aware topic modelling pipeline and manual validation to identify how misconceptions arise and affect migraineurs, including a COVID-19 subset. They identify seven thematic areas (symptoms, treatments, triggers, work/school, relationships, women’s issues, mental health) and distill four actionable facts the public should know, with COVID-19 adding further complexity. The work informs migraine literacy efforts and suggests avenues for public health outreach and digital tools (e.g., symptom-tracking apps) to support migraineurs.
Abstract
Migraine literacy among the public is known to be low, and this lack of understanding has a negative impact on migraineurs' quality of life. To understand this impact, we use text mining methods to study migraine discussion on the Reddit social media platform. We summarize the findings in the form of "four things people should know about chronic migraines": it is a serious disease that affects people of all ages, it can be triggered by many different factors, it affects women more than men, and it can get worse in combination with the COVID-19 virus.