Social Listening – Revealing Parkinson’s Disease over Day and Night

Abstract

Background: Nocturnal symptoms in Parkinson’s disease and their related burdens on patients are often treated after management of daytime manifestations. In order to better understand the unmet needs of nocturnal symptoms management, we sought to analyze the characteristics of nocturnal symptoms and the burden of nocturnal-occurring motor and non-motor symptoms from patients’ perspectives.Methods: We used a contemporary Social Listening big-data technique to analyze large amounts of Parkinson’s disease symptoms in patient-doctor and patient-patient dialogues available from social media platforms in China. Frequency of nocturnal symptoms as a proportion of total dialogues per year and their relative negative sentiment were analyzed. As a contrast, overall symptoms (occurring at day or night) were also analyzed. Results: We found that share of voice for overall motor symptoms did not increase from 2016 to 2018 (79%, p = 0.5), but share of voice for non-motor symptoms was 69% in 2018, growing by 7% (p < 0.01), and motor complications was 9%, growing by 6% (p < 0.01), respectively. For nocturnal symptoms, 45% of the analyzed PD population reported nocturnal symptoms in 2018, growing by 6% from 2016 (p < 0.01). Share of voice for nocturnal-occurring motor symptoms was higher than non-motor symptoms. Non-motor symptoms evoked higher negative sentiment no matter whether they occurred during the day or night. For symptoms that can occur at either day or night, each nocturnal symptom was rated with a higher negative sentiment score than the same symptom during the day, regardless of the type of symptom (motor, non-motor, or motor complication).Conclusions: The growing share of voice and the greater negative sentiment of nocturnal symptoms from patients’ perspectives suggest that management of nocturnal symptoms is an unmet need of patients with Parkinson’s disease. A greater emphasis on detecting nocturnal symptoms and treating them with 24-hour care is encouraged.