Twitter helps assess migraine trends

A study looked into how migraine sufferers discuss their migraine attacks on twitter and analyzed gender of the person, day of the week, and country the person lives in to assess trends about migraines.

Someone's drilling an icicle into your temple, you're throwing up, and light and sound are unbearable.

Yes, it's another migraine attack. But now in 140 characters on Twitter, you can share your agony with other sufferers. It indicates a trend toward the cathartic sharing of physical pain, as well as emotional pain on social media.

"As technology and language evolve, so does the way we share our suffering," said principal investigator Alexandre DaSilva, assistant professor and director of the Headache and Orofacial Pain Effort at University of Michigan School of Dentistry. "It's the first known study to show the instant and broad impact of migraine attacks on modern patients' lives by decoding manually each one of their individual attack-related tweets."

DaSilva's team, including research fellows Thiago Nascimento and Marcos DosSantos, worked with 50 students and residents to categorize 21,741 tweets. They eliminated advertising, metaphor and nonrelated migraine tweets, which has not been done in previous studies. Further, they analyzed the meaning of each individual migraine tweet.

"We sought to evaluate the instant expression of actual self-reported migraine attacks in social media," DaSilva said.

Results generated unique information about who suffers from migraines and what, how, where and when they use social media to describe their pain. The findings overlapped significantly with other traditional epidemiologic migraine studies, DaSilva and colleagues said.

Among other things, they examined the most common descriptors for migraines, including profanities, tweet times and locations, and impact on productivity and mood. Only 65 percent of the migraine tweets were from actual sufferers of migraines posting in real-time. Other tweets were advertising, general discussion, retweets, etc., indicating that not everything in social media is meaningful to the patient, DaSilva said.

Among the findings: Females accounted for about 74 percent of migraine tweets; males accounted for 17 percent. The higher global peak of migraine tweets occurred Mondays at 14:00 GMT, or 10 a.m Eastern Daylight Saving Time. The U.S. accounted for 58 percent of migraine tweets, followed by Europe at 20 percent. In the U.S., migraine tweets peaked at 9 a.m. and 8 p.m. on weekdays. The morning tweets peaked later on weekends. Roughly 44 percent of tweets reported that migraine attacks immediately impacted mood. The most common migraine descriptors were "worst" at nearly 15 percent and "massive" at 8 percent.

Migraines pose a huge public health problem, harming mood, productivity and overall quality of life. An estimated 12 percent of the Western world population suffer migraine attacks, and of those, 75 percent see reduced functionality and 30 percent require bed rest.

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Twitter and Google Show Migraines Peak During Work Week

Data from twitter and google suggest that migraines occur most during the work week.

Scientists have found yet another reason to be glad it’s Friday. A new study found that the feeling we all have from time to time—that the work week gives us a headache—might not be all in our minds.

Sparked by curiosity about what online behavior could tell them about pain, researchers from Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School probed search engine queries and Twitter posts that mentioned “migraine” or “headache.” What they found, in a study published online in the journal Cephalalgia, is that headache mentions peaked on weekdays, hitting their high early in the week and receding on Fridays.

Clas Linnman, an instructor in anesthesia at Boston Children’s who led the work, said that he and his colleagues usually do brain imaging studies of people who suffer migraines and other forms of pain that can alter the brain. But after reading about researchers who used Twitter to track mood disorders, they began to wonder what Googling and tweeting could reveal about when migraines occurred.

First, the researchers analyzed five-and-a-half years of search activity on Google. They found that “migraine” searches seemed to take a break when people did—occurring far less frequently on the weekends or on Thanksgiving or Memorial Day than on the weekdays. The most migraine searches occurred on Tuesdays and the fewest on Fridays.

It makes sense to Linnman.

“People will get more migraines when they’re stressed,” he said.

Then, they looked at activity on Twitter and found that Monday had the highest number of migraine mentions and Friday the lowest. In a subset of tweets that mentioned “migraine,” the vast majority were by women, a gender breakdown that follows the pattern seen in large clinical studies.

Although the researchers didn’t put each tweet under the microscope, they did note that many of the brief missives included detailed information, such as symptoms, triggers, therapies, and the duration of the attack. Online behavior has been used to track everything from flu outbreaks to social unrest. Now, the researchers think they may provide not only evidence about when disease happens, but also information about factors like stress, eating, and sleeping habits that may play a role in triggering the disease.

Less severe complaints tracked the same general pattern. Tweets mentioning “headaches” also peaked during the work week, between 7 a.m. and 5 p.m.

With that in mind, take a deep breath: the weekend is near.

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