Migraine sufferers use Twitter to share pain woes in real time

Researchers have revealed that now migraine sufferers are using Twitter to share their pain in real time.

Principal investigator Alexandre DaSilva, assistant professor and director of the Headache and Orofacial Pain Effort at University of Michigan School of Dentistry, said that as technology and language evolve, so does the way we share our suffering.

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.

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.

The study has been published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.