Could Your Use Of Twitter Say Something About A Potential Sleep Disorder?

Could our regular use of Twitter tell us something about problems with insomnia or other sleep disorders?

Recent findings published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research show a first look at relationships between social media and sleep issues, based primarily on the assessments expressed in users' tweets that might give small hints regarding sleep disorders or a greater risk of psychological issues.

As statistics show that between 50 and 70 million Americans are affected by sleep issues that can drastically impact their productivity, the research could help to lower the risk of other issues as well, including health issues like diabetes, cardiovascular disease and depression.

"Sleep deprivation and chronic sleep disorders are not well understood," said lead study author John Brownstein, PhD, of Boston Children's Informatics Program, in a news release. "We wanted to see if we could use new forms of online data, such as Twitter, to characterize the sleep disordered individual and possibly uncover new, previously-undescribed populations of patients suffering sleep problems."

For the study, researchers used publicly available data to create a virtual cohort of 896 active Twitter users whose tweets contained sleep-related words like "insomnia" or "can't sleep," as well as the names of common sleep aids or medications. They also compared data from the cohort to those of a second group of 934 users who did not tweet with sleep-related terms, examining factors such as age total number of tweets; total numbers of followers or people followed; number of favorite tweets (that is, the number of tweets by others that the user had favorite); length of time on Twitter (that is, how long the user had had an active Twitter account); average number of tweets per day; location and time zone.

Then they assessed the time of day and average sentiment with each tweet, including positive, neutral or negative attitudes.

The resulting profile of a Twitter user with sleep issues--compared to a Twitter user without--looked like this, courtesy of the news release.

-have been active on Twitter for a relatively long time
-has fewer followers and follows fewer people
-posts few tweets per day on average
-more active on Twitter between 6:00 pm and 5:59 am
-more active on Twitter on weekends and early weekdays
-more likely to post tweets with negative sentiment

"These findings are preliminary and observational only, and need to be studied further," Brownstein cautioned. "But they suggest that social media can be a useful addition to our toolkit for studying the patient experience and behavioral epidemiology of sleep disorders."

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