Table 1.
Dataset statistics after pre-processing.
Fig 1.
Number of Posts and Comments in the dataset across the time periods.
(A) Post and Comments in the r/rheumatoid Subreddit (B) Post and Comments in the r/rheumatoidarthritis Subreddit (C) Combined Posts and Comments from both Subreddits. The blue line represents the posts, while the red line represents the number of comments.
Table 2.
Examples of posts annotated as positive, negative, or neutral sentiments.
Fig 2.
Overall sentiment and emotion across the dataset.
(A) Sentiment classification showing the proportions of positive, neutral and negative (B) Emotion classification showing the proportions of anger, disgust, fear, joy, neutral, sadness, and surprise. (C) Emotional trends in posts: Distribution of emotions (anger, disgust, fear, joy, neutral, sadness, and surprise) in posts from r/rheumatoid and r/rheumatoidarthritis during the pre-COVID, COVID, and post-COVID periods. (D) Emotional trends in comments: Distribution of the same emotions in comments from the two subreddits during the same time periods. The y-axis represents the frequency of posts or comments expressing each emotion.
Fig 3.
Sentiment analysis of Reddit posts and comments in r/rheumatoid and r/rheumatoidarthritis subreddits from September 2018 to October 2024.
(A) Sentiment trends over time for posts in r/rheumatoid. (B) Sentiment trends over time for comments in r/rheumatoid. (C) Sentiment trends over time for posts in r/rheumatoidarthritis. (D) Sentiment trends over time for comments in r/rheumatoidarthritis. Vertical dashed lines mark the pre-COVID, COVID, and post-COVID periods. Sentiment is categorized as positive (green), neutral (gray), and negative (red).
Fig 4.
Analysis of Reddit posts and comments across the subreddits.
(A) Sentiment analysis showing the distribution of positive, neutral, and negative sentiments in r/rheumatoid and r/rheumatoidarthritis. (B) Emotion analysis displaying the distribution of emotions (anger, disgust, fear, joy, neutral, sadness, and surprise) in both subreddits. (C) Word cloud for r/rheumatoid illustrating the most frequently used words. (D) Word cloud for r/rheumatoidarthritis highlighting prominent words based on frequency.
Table 3.
Top 10 topics extracted from the posts and comments of r/rheumatoid subreddit across the time-periods.
Table 4.
Top 10 topics extracted from the posts and comments of r/rheumatoidarthritis subreddit across the time-periods.
Fig 5.
Quantitative and sentiment analysis of rheumatoid arthritis drug discussions.
(A) Percentage of posts and comments for the subreddits r/rheumatoid and r/rheumatoidarthritis that discuss about drugs for Rheumatoid Arthritis (B) Percentage of the 10 most discussed drugs across the time-periods (C) Ratio of Positive posts and comments and Negative posts and comments that mention the drug. (D) Emotion analysis of the 5 most discussed drugs across the time-periods.
Fig 6.
Analysis of URL-containing posts and comments in r/rheumatoid and r/rheumatoidarthritis subreddit.
(A) Percentage of posts and comments containing URLs across different categories in r/rheumatoid (S1) and r/rheumatoidarthritis (S2). Categories include Academic Resources, Blogs and Personal Websites, Government Websites, Medical and Healthcare Websites, News Outlets, Non-Profit Organizations, Others, Shopping, and Social Media Platforms. (B) Proportional distribution of URL categories across pre-COVID, COVID, and post-COVID periods in both subreddits, reflecting relative rather than absolute frequencies. (C) Percentage of sentiment distribution (positive, neutral, negative) in URL-containing posts and comments. (D) Percentage of emotion distribution (anger, disgust, fear, joy, neutral, sadness, surprise) in URL-containing posts and comments.