Mind the Gap: Social media analysis of 38,609 posts highlights discrepancies between clinical focus and patient priorities in neurosurgical care.

Résumé

OBJECTIVE: To analyze social media discussions among cranial neurosurgical patients to identify prevalent concerns, emotional patterns, and quality of life impacts that may not be fully captured in traditional clinical assessments.METHODS: We analyzed 38,609 neurosurgery-related posts from Reddit using natural language processing and the Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner (VADER) sentiment analysis tool. Posts were categorized into clinical domains (symptoms, conditions, procedures, treatments, complications, quality of life, and clinical course), with sentiment scores calculated for each category. Co-occurrence analysis identified significant term associations. Statistical comparisons used Mann-Whitney U tests with Benjamini-Hochberg correction.RESULTS: Patient discussions predominantly focused on symptoms (63.56 % of posts) and quality of life impacts (45.93 %), with work/education concerns (25.99 %) and headache-related complaints (32.10 %) being most prevalent. Cognitive symptoms appeared in 19.78 % of posts, while epilepsy-related terms dominated condition discussions (23.04 %). Sentiment analysis revealed a significant contrast between symptom discussions (mean sentiment: -0.007) and treatment discussions (0.056, effect size d = 0.27, p