Impact of COVID-19 on Multiple Sclerosis Topic Discussion on Twitter

Introduction: Multiple sclerosis (MS) is one of the world’s most common neurologic disorders. Social media have been proposed as a way to maintain and even increase social interaction for people with MS. The objective this work identify compare topics on Twitter during first wave COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: Data was collected using API between 9/2/2019 13/5/2020. SentiStrength used analyze data day that pandemic declared turning point. Frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf) each unigram calculated gains in tf-idf value. A comparative analysis relevance words categories among datasets performed. Results: original dataset contained over 610k tweets, our final had 147,963 tweets. After 10th march some gained positive tweets (“Healthcare professional”, “Chronic conditions”, “Condition burden”), while negative “Emotional aspects” became more relevant “COVID-19” emerged new topic. Conclusions: Our provides insight how has changed online discourse