New research suggest that there may be a relationship between social media use and sleep issues.

Researchers at Boston Children's Hospital found that the sentiments expressed in users' tweets gives preliminary hints that patients with sleep disorders may be a greater risk of psychosocial issues.

Sleep issues, like Insomnia and shift work sleep disorder, affect between 50 and 70 million Americans. Apart from their impact on productivity, accidents and risky behaviors, chronic sleep disorders also contribute to diabetes, cardiovascular disease and depression.

"Sleep deprivation and chronic sleep disorders are not well understood," John Brownstein, who directs the hospital's Computational Epidemiology Group, said in a statement. "We wanted to see if we could use new forms of online data, such as Twitter, to characterize the sleep disordered individual and possibly uncover new, previously-undescribed populations of patients suffering sleep problems."

For the study, researchers examined publically available anonymized data from Twitter to create a virtual cohort of nearly 900 active Twitter users whose tweets contained sleep-related words, such as "can't sleep," "insomnia," or hashtags, or the names of common sleep aids or medications. They then compared data from that cohort to those of a second group of 934 users who did not tweet using sleep-related terms.

They also assessed when these tweets were posted.

They found that people who suffered from a sleep disorder are less active on Twitter on average, especially during the day, but they tweet more during traditional sleeping hours.

"These findings are preliminary and observational only, and need to be studied further," Brownstein warned. "But they suggest that social media can be a useful addition to our toolkit for studying the patient experience and behavioral epidemiology of sleep disorders."

The findings are detailed in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.