Mucuna pruriens descriptions on Reddit



07 Mar 2025 (Last Modified 31 Mar 2025)


Mucuna pruriens descriptions on Reddit

Thank you for viewing our poster at #ACMT2025.

TLDR

Introduction

  • Parkinson’s Disease results from loss of dopamine-producing neurons. The main treatment is levodopa (L-DOPA).
  • Approximately 60% of patients with mild or moderate Parkinson’s use herbal and dietary supplements (HDS) including Mucuna pruriens (MP), which contains 2-40% L-DOPA1.
  • HDS use may interfere with physician treatment.
  • Patients rarely disclose HDS use to physicians but frequently discuss HDS use for other conditions in online forums.
  • We have shown online forums as a valid source of information on substance usage2,3.
  • Analysis of discussions in online forums may identify reasons for HDS use and non-adherence to standard therapy

The overall goall of this study is to:

  • Is Macuna pruriens perceived as more effective or tolerable than pharmaceutical L-DOPA?
  • What circumstances that lead people to use MP-containing supplements?

Methods

Data Acquisition. Author MC wrote custom software in R and Python to extract all comments and posts from the subreddit r/Parkinson’s from the start of the subreddit to January 2025. The software is available on GitHub at LINK.

Data Preprocessing. We manually standardized comments, replacing brand names with generic names, expanded abbreviations, and corrected misspellings. We counted multiple identical posts by one user as one comment.

Data Analysis. Perception. We manually labelled each comment for (1) mentioning MP, (2) mentioning L-DOPA, (3) if the experience was positive, negative, neither, or both.

Thematic Analysis. We conducted two rounds of qualitative analysis to identify themes in the post and then group post and comments by theme.

Results

graph TD
  A[Data Acquisition] --> B[Data Preprocessing]
  B --> C[Data Analysis]
  C --> D[Perception]
  C --> E[Thematic Analysis]

Conclusions

References

  1. 1.Wolfrath, S. C. et al. Use of nutritional supplements in Parkinson’s disease patients. Movement Disorders: Official Journal of the Movement Disorder Society 21, 1098–1101 (2006).