What Patients With Asthma Share When No One Listens: Multimethod Observational Study of Patient Narratives on Reddit

BACKGROUND: The use of social media platforms, such as Reddit, to seek and share information about disease management and treatment strategies is increasingly common. In the context of asthma-a chronic condition characterized by limiting symptoms and exacerbations that require active patient engagement and adherence to treatment-there is a lack of research describing the content of Reddit posts and the specific topics of interest to patients. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to describe the topics discussed by users on the Reddit asthma forum and identify the sentiments and polarity of the language used in the posts. METHODS: A retrospective observational study of public posts on the asthma subreddit forum (r/Asthma) over a 1-year period (October 2023-October 2024). All posts and related threads were included, subdivided into hot, news, and top, and those voted "up" or "down," those that received "awards," categorized as "golds." The messages were reviewed manually and excluded if they were not related to asthma. A mixed methods analysis was conducted, comprising (1) analysis using text lemmatization, (2) structural topic modeling to identify topics based on word frequency, and (3) sentiment and polarity analysis. This approach aimed to identify the most frequently used topics on Reddit, detect positive and negative sentiments based on the words used, and acceptance or rejection (polarity) based on the language used in the asthma subreddit. Statistical analyses were performed using R software (version 4.1.3; R Foundation for Statistical Computing), with a significance threshold set at P