The social phenotype: Extracting a patient-centered perspective of diabetes from health-related blogs

We show that patients with diabetes, when accessing on-line forums, express a perception of their disease in a way that might be noticeably different from what is inferred from published QoL assessments on diabetes. In our study, we found that issues reported to have a daily impact on these patients are diet, glycemic control, drugs and clinical tests. These problems are not commonly considered in QoL assessments, since they are not perceived by doctors as representing severe limitations. Although limited to the case of Italian diabetic patients, we suggest that the methodology described in this paper, which is language and disease agnostic, could be applied to other diseases and countries, since misalignment between doctor and patients, and the importance of collecting unbiased patient perceptions, has been emphasized in many studies ([2,3]inter alia). Extracting the social phenotype of a disease might help acquiring patient-centered information on health care experiences on a much wider scale.