Gate applied here: H
02 · Research
Sleep and Pain in Rheumatoid Arthritis
Student Researcher / Intern · Stanford Medicine · Pain Intelligence Lab · Stanford, California
Worked at the Pain Intelligence Lab at Stanford Medicine, headed by Dr. Titilola Falasinnu, on a paper titled Patient Perspectives on the Bidirectional Relationship Between Sleep and Pain in Rheumatoid Arthritis: A Qualitative Analysis of Reddit Discussions.
A glimpse of the work: topic modeling with BERTopic, testing how well the topics held up across seeds, and reading closely into what patients were saying. The position ended in September 2026.
A look at the work
- Reviewed related literature on RA and on the project’s methods to understand where my work fit.
- Ran a k-means BERTopic model on the posts and found that the best coherence on one seed did not hold across others, so I reran it over several seeds and chose the topic count by average coherence.
- Read through the resulting topics and the post patterns within each one.
- Reran the model on posts cut down to the text around sleep-related terms, to focus it on sleep.
Results
- Sleep-related topics got little focus, and the posts represent younger patients more than the older population RA most commonly affects.
- Other issues that may be useful for healthcare providers: extreme emotional distress from social isolation and lifestyle changes, and systemic failure in early diagnosis and treatment.
Rheumatoid arthritis · Sleep and pain · Qualitative analysis · BERTopic · Topic modeling
Questions about this work? shashish.v.vasireddi@gmail.com