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In addition to hashtags and subreddits, some social media platforms allow for geotagging or sharing a user’s geographical latitude and longitude coordinates in a post. Geotags have been used in social media research to identify geographically relevant information from social media data [34-36]. We aim to examine the effectiveness of using thematic structures in a deep learning framework to identify alcohol-related behaviors across different social media platforms. First, we trained on Reddit subreddits to identify alcohol-related targets on another social media platform (Twitter) with a different thematic structure (hashtags). We show that these data-driven hashtags contain interpretable information about alcohol consumption in the United States. Finally, we present validated and queryable hashtags from our model that behavioral health researchers can use as a starting point for the identification of alcohol-related content on Twitter, Reddit, and other social media platforms.
However, it’s important to keep in mind that tapering is rarely an effective approach to alcohol addiction treatment. Public health events such as COVID-19 that resulted in isolation and quarantine had a substantial impact on population physical and mental health globally. Our study highlights the importance of social media discussions on platforms like Reddit that offer ecological and large-scale data to summarize and potentially measure changes in health behaviors. The candid and open expressions on social media data could well complement the rich traditional data collection methods and further provide insights for real-time public health infoveillance, and targeted messaging at the times of crises. If someone with this condition has alcohol use disorder, a healthcare provider will need to set up a treatment plan. This plan will help manage the condition as well as the withdrawal symptoms that may occur with abstinence.
Protracted withdrawal
This is why skilled rehabilitation centers, where competent and compassionate professionals can supervise the detoxification process and manage withdrawal symptoms, are so vital for patient health and safety. Withdrawal and detox are the difficult first steps toward sobriety, but they are well worth taking. People who feel they aren’t ready to detox in a rehab facility sometimes try to taper off alcohol themselves.
- Medications typically include beta-blockers (for heart rhythm and blood pressure issues) and diuretics (to help your body get rid of excess fluid and swelling).
- Lifestyle factors such as diet, exercise and smoking all combine to raise or lower your risk.
- Those who don’t fully recover are also likely to need this kind of treatment indefinitely.
- For over 20 years Dr. Umhau was a senior clinical investigator at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Alcohol-induced cardiomyopathy is a condition where consuming too much alcohol damages your heart. This damage happens because parts of your heart stretch and enlarge. That weakens your heart muscle, keeping it from 5 Tips to Consider When Choosing a Sober Living House pumping as well as it should. Over time, this means your heart can’t pump blood as effectively, which reduces your body’s available oxygen supply. Once you stop drinking, the alcohol leaves your system quite quickly.
Poor sleep
When you drink, different enzymes in your liver work to break down alcohol so that it can be removed from your body. Whatever the reason, there are serious consequences when someone with AUD drinks. The justifications and excuses are harmful and will soon lead the individual to drink in the manner with which he or she is most familiar. The individual will eventually, and in most cases quickly, find themselves back where they started before making the noble decision to get sober and clean up the consequences of their actions. In many cases, the individual may even find himself or herself at a deeper level of addiction after relapsing. Of course, it varies from drinker to drinker, and no expression of the disease is the same.
This ability to learn hashtags from data is critical, as new hashtags are created every day and may differ substantially between platforms. As future work, we plan to extend this study to other mental and behavioral health topics, such as depression and substance use, and other social media platforms that use hashtags, such as Facebook and Instagram. Deep learning has previously been used to combine the analysis of images and texts from social media users [38]. In our future work, we will expand the presented architecture to include other data modalities, such as images and videos, to increase screening capabilities. A notable benefit of using hashtags and subreddits as platform-specific labels for studying alcohol-related outcomes is interpretability. Although deep learning models excel at understanding massive quantities of data, many NLP and deep learning models rely on complex feature representations to classify or characterize text.
How To Have A Difficult Conversation About Addiction With Your Loved One
That also may involve supportive care that will help prevent — or at least reduce the impact of — any alcohol withdrawal symptoms. Supportive care for withdrawal is especially important because some of its symptoms can be severe or even life-threatening. A healthcare provider can also connect you with available resources and refer you to other specialists and experts who can help you reduce or stop your alcohol intake. Notably, using a predefined number of hashtags could be biased and too narrow for capturing relevant information, potentially missing informative hashtags for exposure or outcome. Traditional keyword approaches may fail to capture various pieces of information from slang and novel hashtags from platform-specific languages as they are created and popularized. In addition, keyword databases may not exist for all outcomes of interest.
But for breast and esophageal cancer, the risk increases, albeit slightly, with any alcohol consumption. More recent research has found that even low levels of drinking slightly increase the risk of high blood pressure and heart disease, and the risk goes up dramatically for people who drink excessively. The good news is that when people stop drinking or just cut back, their blood pressure goes down.