When PCOS Meets Eating Disorders: An Explainable AI Approach to Detecting the Hidden Triple Burden
For clinicians and researchers, this provides an explainable AI screening tool to identify the hidden triple burden in PCOS patients from social media data.
The authors developed small, open-source language models to detect body image distress, disordered eating, and metabolic challenges in PCOS-related social media posts, achieving 75.3% exact match accuracy on held-out posts, with robust comorbidity detection and strong explainability.
Women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) face substantially elevated risks of body image distress, disordered eating, and metabolic challenges, yet existing natural language processing approaches for detecting these conditions lack transparency and cannot identify co-occurring presentations. We developed small, open-source language models to automatically detect this triple burden in social media posts with grounded explainability. We collected 1,000 PCOS-related posts from six subreddits, with two trained annotators labeling posts using guidelines operationalizing Lee et al. (2017) clinical framework. Three models (Gemma-2-2B, Qwen3-1.7B, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B) were fine-tuned using Low-Rank Adaptation to generate structured explanations with textual evidence. The best model achieved 75.3 percent exact match accuracy on 150 held-out posts, with robust comorbidity detection and strong explainability. Performance declined with diagnostic complexity, indicating their best use is for screening rather than autonomous diagnosis.