Health information needs regarding diabetes mellitus in China: an Internet-based analysis

Background The Internet has become an important carrier for consumers to express their health information needs and search for health information,we can analyze a lot of valuable information about what the patients are concerned, and health providers like hospitals can make use of these questions raised by patients to improve their services such as patient health education, patient follow-up to consumers. However, there are no Internet-based analyses of health information needs pertaining to diabetes in China until now. Hereby, The diabetes problems put forward by consumers on the 39 health website were dynamically analyzed in order to know the trends of consumers' demand for health information of diabetes and provide reference to improve health education and patients' self-management ability of blood glucose.Methods we have done a study of statistically analyzing the questions about diabetes collected from 39 health website, the number of which is 151,589. We have divided these questions into 9 categories using a convolutional neural networkResults The diabetes problems of consumer are presented as follows, diagnosis: 34.95%, treatment: 25.17%, lifestyle: 21.09%, complication: 8.00%, maternity-related:5.00%, prognosis: 2.59%, health provider choosing: 1.40%, prevention: 1.23%, others: 0.58%, The elderly are more concerned about the treatment and complications of diabetes, while the young are more concerned about the maternity-related and prognosis of diabetes.The diabetes drugs most frequently mentioned by consumers are insulin, metformin and Xiaoke pills,The most concerned complication is caidiovascular disease and diabetic eye disease.Conclusion Diabetes health education should focus on how to prevent diabetes and the contents of health education should be different for differernt age groups ;on diabetes treatment, the use of insulin and oral hypoglycemic drugs education should be strengthened.