Sahithi Lakamana

• Master of Science
• Emory University

Black women and men outpace other races for stimulant-involved overdose mortality despite lower lifetime use. Growth in mortality from prescription stimulant medications is increasing in tandem with prescribing patterns for these medications. We used Twitter to explore nonmedical prescription stimulant use (NMPSU) among Black women and men using em...

Background The increasing use of social media to share lived and living experiences of substance use presents a unique opportunity to obtain information on side effects, use patterns, and opinions on novel psychoactive substances. However, due to the large volume of data, obtaining useful insights through natural language processing technologies su...

BACKGROUND The increasing use of social media to share lived and living experiences of substance use presents a unique opportunity to obtain information on side-effects, usage patterns, and opinions on novel psychoactive substances (NPS). However, due to the large volume of data, obtaining useful insights through natural language processing (NLP) t...

Background: There is growing concern around the use of sodium nitrite (SN) as an emerging means of suicide, particularly among younger people. Given the limited information on the topic from traditional public health surveillance sources, we studied posts made to an online suicide discussion forum, "Sanctioned Suicide," which is a primary source of...

BACKGROUND There is growing concern around the use of sodium nitrite (SN) as an emerging means of suicide, particularly among younger people. Given limited information on the topic from traditional public health surveillance sources, we studied posts made to a suicide discussion online forum, ‘Sanctioned Suicide’, a primary source of information on...

Background There is growing concern around the use of sodium nitrite (SN) as an emerging means of suicide, particularly among younger people. Given the limited information on the topic from traditional public health surveillance sources, we studied posts made to an online suicide discussion forum, “Sanctioned Suicide,” which is a primary source of...

The dataset described is an aspect-level sentiment analysis dataset for therapies, including medication, behavioral and other therapies, created by leveraging user-generated text from Twitter. The dataset was constructed by collecting Twitter posts using keywords associated with the therapies (often referred to as treatments). Subsequently, subsets...

Objectives: Xylazine is an α2-agonist increasingly prevalent in the illicit drug supply. Our objectives were to curate information about xylazine through social media from people who use drugs (PWUDs). Specifically, we sought to answer the following: (1) What are the demographics of Reddit subscribers reporting exposure to xylazine? (2) Is xylazin...

Background Substance use, including the non-medical use of prescription medications, is a global health problem resulting in hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths and other health problems. Social media has emerged as a potent source of information for studying substance use-related behaviours and their consequences. Mining large-scale social me...

Background Due to the high burden of chronic pain, and the detrimental public health consequences of its treatment with opioids, there is a high-priority need to identify effective alternative therapies. Social media is a potentially valuable resource for knowledge about self-reported therapies by chronic pain sufferers. Methods We attempted to (a...

Social media platforms are increasingly being used by intimate partner violence (IPV) victims to share experiences and seek support. If such information is automatically curated, it may be possible to conduct social media based surveillance and even design interventions over such platforms. In this paper, we describe the development of a supervised...

Migraine is a highly prevalent and disabling neurological disorder. However, information about migraine management in real-world settings is limited to traditional health information sources. In this paper, we (i) verify that there is substantial migraine-related chatter available on social media (Twitter and Reddit), self-reported by those with mi...

Intimate partner violence (IPV) increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. Collecting actionable IPV-related data from conventional sources (e.g., medical records) was challenging during the pandemic, generating a need to obtain relevant data from non-conventional sources, such as social media. Social media, like Reddit, is a preferred medium of commu...

Introduction: Reddit hosts a large active community of members dedicated to the discussion of cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome. We sought to describe common themes discussed and the most frequently mentioned triggers and therapies for cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome exacerbations in the Reddit online community. Methods: Data collected from six...

Objectives: Xylazine is an alpha-2 agonist increasingly prevalent in the illicit drug supply. Our objectives were to curate information about xylazine through social media from People Who Use Drugs (PWUDs). Specifically, we sought to answer the following: 1) what are the demographics of Reddit subscribers reporting exposure to xylazine? 2) is xylaz...

Migraine is a high-prevalence and disabling neurological disorder. However, information migraine management in real-world settings could be limited to traditional health information sources. In this paper, we (i) verify that there is substantial migraine-related chatter available on social media (Twitter and Reddit), self-reported by migraine suffe...

BACKGROUND Social media have served as lucrative platforms for spreading misinformation and for promoting fraudulent products for the treatment, testing, and prevention of COVID-19. This has resulted in the issuance of many warning letters by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA). While social media continue to serve as the primary p...

Background Social media has served as a lucrative platform for spreading misinformation and for promoting fraudulent products for the treatment, testing, and prevention of COVID-19. This has resulted in the issuance of many warning letters by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). While social media continues to serve as the primary platform fo...

Due to the high economic and public health burden of chronic pain, and the risk of public health consequences of opioid-based treatments, there is a need to identify effective alternative therapies. The evidence basis for many alternative therapies is weak or nonexistent. Social media presents a unique opportunity to gather large-scale knowledge ab...

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a preventable public health problem that affects millions of people worldwide. Approximately one in four women are estimated to be or have been victims of severe violence at some point in their lives, irrespective of age, ethnicity, and economic status. Victims often report IPV experiences on social media, and aut...

We investigated the utility of Twitter for conducting multi-faceted geolocation-centric pandemic surveillance, using India as an example. We collected over 4 million COVID19-related tweets related to the Indian outbreak between January and July 2021. We geolocated the tweets, applied natural language processing to characterize the tweets (eg., iden...

Background Social media have served as lucrative platforms for spreading misinformation and for promoting fraudulent products for the treatment, testing, and prevention of COVID-19. This has resulted in the issuance of many warning letters by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA). While social media continue to serve as the primary p...

Social media have served as lucrative platforms for misinformation and for promoting fraudulent products for the treatment, testing and prevention of COVID-19. This has resulted in the issuance of many warning letters by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA). While social media continue to serve as the primary platform for the promot...

Background Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a preventable public health issue that affects millions of people worldwide. Approximately one in four women are estimated to be or have been victims of severe violence at some point in their lives, irrespective of their age, ethnicity, and economic status. Victims often report IPV experiences on social...

Breast cancer patients often discontinue their long-term treatments, such as hormone therapy, increasing the risk of cancer recurrence. These discontinuations may be caused by adverse patient-centered outcomes (PCOs) due to hormonal drug side effects or other factors. PCOs are not detectable through laboratory tests, and are sparsely documented in...

Objective: To mine Twitter and quantitatively analyze COVID-19 symptoms self-reported by users, compare symptom distributions across studies, and create a symptom lexicon for future research. Materials and Methods: We retrieved tweets using COVID-19-related keywords, and performed semiautomatic filtering to curate self-reports of positive-tested...

Breast cancer patients often discontinue their long-term treatments, such as hormone therapy, increasing the risk of cancer recurrence. These discontinuations are often caused by adverse patient-centered outcomes (PCOs) due to hormonal drug side effects or other factors. PCOs are not detectable through laboratory tests and are sparsely documented i...

Objective To mine Twitter to quantitatively analyze COVID-19 symptoms self-reported by users, compare symptom distributions against clinical studies, and create a symptom lexicon for the research community. Materials and methods We retrieved tweets using COVID-19-related keywords, and performed several layers of semi-automatic filtering to cura...