Why Facebook Doesn't Really Help Diagnose Diabetes

Welcome to Impact Factor, your weekly commentary on a new medical study that is just perfect for sharing on social media.

Of course, what would that say about you?

A new study[1] appearing in PLOS One suggests that your Facebook posts can be used to diagnose a variety of diseases. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania found 999 brave souls willing to share their entire Facebook history—amounting to 950,000 Facebook status updates and 20 million words, which is equivalent to about 15 copies of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, although with slightly less sardonic wit and slightly more emojis.

From these data, they derived what they call a "social mediome" (we'll see if that catches on)—a set of 700 variables that reflected the 500 most common word pairs seen and 200 common word-cluster topics.

Видео Why Facebook Doesn't Really Help Diagnose Diabetes канала Medscape