Facebook posts can help predict health conditions

Your Facebook posts could clue physicians in to your health, according to a new study. Researchers analyzed Facebook posts of nearly 1,000 patients and linked the posts to the patients’ EHR data. They then built a language processing model that scoured the posts to predict health conditions. Another model predicted conditions based on some demographic information alone, and a third model made predictions based on the posts and demographic information. The program using Facebook data alone was able to predict all 21 health conditions the scientists were testing for, including pregnancy and diabetes. For example, the top quarter of patients who used religious language (such as “pray” and “God”) in their posts were 15 times more likely to have diabetes. These are just associations, but can reveal to clinicians some of the underlying emotional and behavioral markers of diseases, the authors write.