Analysis of patient perspectives on bariatric surgery using an anonymous online forum.

Résumé

OBJECTIVE: Bariatric surgery is utilized to treat morbid obesity in the United States. The study objective was to identify and analyze topics of interest on a popular social media platform used by bariatric surgery patients.METHODS: Online posts were obtained from the "r/BariatricSurgery" subreddit on Reddit.com. Posts were categorized by topic (Care Acquisition, Surgery-Related, Quality of Life Treatment Anxiety/Seeking validation for feelings) and author type. The sentiment analysis package Valence Aware Dictionary for Sentimental Reasoning (VADER) was then used to generate a compound score of the sentiment of each post. Posts with strongly positive sentiment (≥ 0.75) underwent word-frequency analysis.RESULTS: In total, 486 posts were evaluated, mainly authored by patients (96.7 %). Most posts discussed Surgery-related topics (77 %), particularly post-operative content, followed by Quality of Life (64.8 %) topics. VADER sentiment analysis found an overall average score of 0.19, with 58.2 % of posts classified as Positive. The lowest sentiment was observed among posts discussing Co-management with Comorbidities (-0.16), while posts with the highest scores discussed Recreation/Occupation (0.88). Of note, Procedure Consideration (0.72) posts also had high sentiment. Frequently utilized words in positive reviews included "surgery" (p