  Migraine is a high-prevalence and disabling neurological disorder. However,
information migraine management in real-world settings could be limited to
traditional health information sources. In this paper, we (i) verify that there
is substantial migraine-related chatter available on social media (Twitter and
Reddit), self-reported by migraine sufferers; (ii) develop a
platform-independent text classification system for automatically detecting
self-reported migraine-related posts, and (iii) conduct analyses of the
self-reported posts to assess the utility of social media for studying this
problem. We manually annotated 5750 Twitter posts and 302 Reddit posts. Our
system achieved an F1 score of 0.90 on Twitter and 0.93 on Reddit. Analysis of
information posted by our 'migraine cohort' revealed the presence of a plethora
of relevant information about migraine therapies and patient sentiments
associated with them. Our study forms the foundation for conducting an in-depth
analysis of migraine-related information using social media data.
