Diabetes: What Are Italian Twitter Users Talking About?

Social media are nowadays used by people to talk about any kind of topic, either private or not, and among others health problems. Concerning health, on social media one can find large communities discussing about chronic diseases. Here people look for advise, information, support, and so on. In this paper we take into consideration the Italian Twitter community interested in diabetes, a chronic blood disease. Our aim is to understand which are the main conversation topics in this community. Thus, we analyzed about 9K tweets written in Italian that contained the world {\em diabete} (diabetes) and performed both a hashtag analysis and a lexicon analysis, the latter by means of ad-hoc dictionaries. Results show that this is a calm community interested into several distinct topics (e.g., disease related information gathering, recipes for diabetes patients, fundraising campaigns), none of which is really predominant over the others.