People who used religious language such as “God” and “pray” in Facebook posts were 15 times more likely to have diabetes than people who used these terms the least.
A new study suggests that words used in Facebook posts could help identify medical conditions such as diabetes and depression.
The study, by the University of Pennsylvania's school of medicine and Stony Brook University, used an automated data collection technique to analyze Facebook posts of nearly 1,000 patients. The study used AI language processing to analyze 949,530 Facebook status updates containing 20,248,122 words, taken from posts that contained at least 500 words. The patients had agreed to have their electronic medical records linked to their profiles on Facebook.
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