Increasing numbers of patients are sharing their health-related experiences online in forums, or on social media websites, such as Twitter and Facebook. This largely untapped source of data about patients’ experience of living with disease and its treatment may be useful in deriving drug safety information such as the occurrence, nature and impact of side effects. Text mining techniques can transform free text into structured data amenable for analysis by automatically recognising mentions of various health conditions and their relationship to a particular medication. These techniques have been used to identify the occurrence of commonly discussed drug adverse events (AEs) from posts on Facebook and Twitter.1 2 They have also been used to identify discussions about benefits of drugs and how these benefits compared with the AEs, other treatment options, costs and complaints about the product.1 A recently published analysis of Twitter posts mentioning prednisolone or prednisone found insomnia and weight gain to be the most frequently discussed side effects.3 However, with the 140 (or more recently 280) character limit per tweet, any side effect information is limited to what can be included and discussed within this space. HealthUnlocked (HU), Europe’s largest social media network for health that supports patients and healthcare providers, hosts over 700 communities (including the UK’s …

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在线健康社区论坛中患者对糖皮质激素相关副作用的讨论

越来越多的患者在论坛或社交媒体网站（如 Twitter 和 Facebook）上在线分享他们与健康相关的经历。关于患者的疾病生活经历及其治疗的大量未开发数据来源可能有助于获得药物安全信息，例如副作用的发生、性质和影响。文本挖掘技术可以通过自动识别对各种健康状况的提及及其与特定药物的关系，将自由文本转换为适合分析的结构化数据。这些技术已被用于从 Facebook 和 Twitter 上的帖子中识别常见药物不良事件 (AE) 的发生。1 2 它们还被用于识别关于药物益处以及这些益处与 AE 相比如何的讨论，其他治疗方案、费用和产品投诉。1 最近发布的 Twitter 帖子分析提到泼尼松龙或泼尼松发现失眠和体重增加是最常讨论的副作用。3 然而，140（或最近的 280）字符每条推文的限制，任何副作用信息仅限于可以在此空间中包含和讨论的内容。HealthUnlocked (HU) 是欧洲最大的健康社交媒体网络，为患者和医疗保健提供者提供支持，拥有 700 多个社区（包括英国…… 任何副作用信息仅限于此空间内可以包含和讨论的内容。HealthUnlocked (HU) 是欧洲最大的健康社交媒体网络，支持患者和医疗保健提供者，拥有 700 多个社区（包括英国…… 任何副作用信息仅限于此空间内可以包含和讨论的内容。HealthUnlocked (HU) 是欧洲最大的健康社交媒体网络，支持患者和医疗保健提供者，拥有 700 多个社区（包括英国……