{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,10,10]],"date-time":"2026-10-10T20:30:59Z","timestamp":1791664259587,"version":"4.3.4"},"reference-count":39,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"5","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2022,5,14]],"date-time":"2022-05-14T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1652486400000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["JPM"],"abstract":"<jats:p>A high number of online support groups have been created on social media platforms to reinforce personal empowerment and social support. The goal of this study was to perform natural language processing by constructing a bag-of-words model and conducting topic modelling based on posts extracted from a chronic pain community. The subreddit called \u2018r\/sChronicPain\u2019 was used to investigate communication on social media platforms for chronic pain patients. After data cleaning and lemmatisation, a word cloud was constructed, and the most frequent words and most frequent body regions were counted. Latent Dirichlet allocation was used to perform topic modelling. In the final analysis set, 937 unique posts were included. The most frequent word was \u2018pain\u2019, followed by \u2018doctor\u2019, \u2018day\u2019, \u2018feel\u2019, \u2018back\u2019, \u2018year\u2019, and \u2018time\u2019. Concerning the body regions, \u2018back\u2019 was most often mentioned, followed by \u2018neck\u2019 and \u2018leg\u2019. Based on coherence scores, one topic was extracted with \u2018pain\u2019 as the keyword with the highest weight. In line with the allocation of chronic low-back pain as a major health problem and increasing prevalence, back pain was most often mentioned. It seems that the primarily treatment trajectories that are proposed by medical physicians are discussed on social media, compared to interventions by other healthcare providers.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/jpm12050797","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2022,5,14]],"date-time":"2022-05-14T09:27:56Z","timestamp":1652520476000},"page":"797","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":19,"title":["Social Media and Chronic Pain: What Do Patients Discuss?"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"12","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-2271-9855","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Lisa","family":"Goudman","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Neurosurgery, Universitair Ziekenhuis Brussel, Laarbeeklaan 101, 1900 Brussels, Belgium"},{"name":"STIMULUS Research Group (reSearch and TeachIng neuroModULation Uz bruSsel), Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Laarbeeklaan 103, 1900 Brussels, Belgium"},{"name":"Center for Neurosciences (C4N), Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Laarbeeklaan 103, 1900 Brussels, Belgium"},{"name":"Pain in Motion (PAIN) Research Group, Department of Physiotherapy, Human Physiology and Anatomy, Faculty of Physical Education and Physiotherapy, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Laarbeeklaan 103, 1090 Brussels, Belgium"},{"name":"Research Foundation\u2014Flanders (FWO), 1090 Brussels, Belgium"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Ann","family":"De Smedt","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"STIMULUS Research Group (reSearch and TeachIng neuroModULation Uz bruSsel), Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Laarbeeklaan 103, 1900 Brussels, Belgium"},{"name":"Center for Neurosciences (C4N), Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Laarbeeklaan 103, 1900 Brussels, Belgium"},{"name":"Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Universitair Ziekenhuis Brussel, Laarbeeklaan 101, 1900 Brussels, Belgium"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-0577-5449","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Maarten","family":"Moens","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Neurosurgery, Universitair Ziekenhuis Brussel, Laarbeeklaan 101, 1900 Brussels, Belgium"},{"name":"STIMULUS Research Group (reSearch and TeachIng neuroModULation Uz bruSsel), Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Laarbeeklaan 103, 1900 Brussels, Belgium"},{"name":"Center for Neurosciences (C4N), Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Laarbeeklaan 103, 1900 Brussels, Belgium"},{"name":"Pain in Motion (PAIN) Research Group, Department of Physiotherapy, Human Physiology and Anatomy, Faculty of Physical Education and Physiotherapy, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Laarbeeklaan 103, 1090 Brussels, Belgium"},{"name":"Department of Radiology, Universitair Ziekenhuis Brussel, Laarbeeklaan 101, 1090 Brussels, Belgium"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2022,5,14]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1867","DOI":"10.1016\/j.chb.2008.02.004","article-title":"Fostering empowerment in online support groups","volume":"24","author":"Barak","year":"2008","journal-title":"Comput. 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