Screening questionnaires are used in medicine as a diagnostic aid. They can raise an alert in case a patient should see a doctor to be screened for the possibility that he\she is suffering from a condition. They are especially helpful for diseases with long diagnostic time, where the time between the appearance of the first symptom and the time of diagnosis is long. Thus, earlier detection of these conditions would have a large impact on a patient’s “quality of life”. Since people share and describe their experiences on social media, it may be possible to use the reported symptoms and experiences of people, made prior to a medical diagnosis, in order to construct medically-valid diagnostic questionnaires which could be answered by laypeople to facilitate in their diagnosis.

In this talk, I will show a generic pipeline that generates a screening questionnaire for a given medical condition. The method first identifies a cohort of users through their posts in dedicated patient groups and a control group of users