OBJECTIVES: People discuss online the impact of health conditions on their lives. Comparing ‘posts’ across diseases may provide an initial understanding of comparative disease burden on quality of life (QOL). For 8 of the most prevalent conditions in the USA (ischemic heart disease [IHD], low back pain, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease [COPD], diabetes mellitus [DM], lung cancer, stroke, depression, migraine), we identified the number of posts focused on QOL, examined the main topics/words used with the QOL term, and explored the proportion of posts with “positive” and “negative” sentiments.

METHODS: A search was conducted on Brandwatch® using the term QOL and terms for the 8 conditions. Searches for posts between June 27, 2021 and June 27, 2022 were conducted, restricted to the USA and the following social media: Blogs, Forums, Consumer Reviews, Tumblr, and Twitter. Relative number of QoL posts were calculated by dividing the number of posts by the number of adults thought to be living with the disease (IHME 2019).

RESULTS: There were >6.5 million QOL mentions in the context of the 8 conditions; 52.5% of these came from men. The relative number of QoL posts was highest in depression (0.821) followed by migraine (0.551), stroke (0.255), IHD (0.182), DM (0.083), lung cancer (0.020), low back pain (0.017), and COPD (0.008). Across diseases, QoL mentions often touched on feelings and cognition (thinking), with an emotional well-being focus (e.g. sadness, anxiety). The QoL posts were associated with a negative sentiment in 59.0% (41.9% [DM] to 66.4% [migraine]); <10% were associated with positive sentiment across diseases.

CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that people discuss QOL online in the context of diseases, often framing their posts negatively (or neutrally). There was a difference in relative mentions between diseases with fewer QOL-related posts in low back pain, COPD, lung cancer, and DM compared to other prevalent diseases.