Identifying potential adverse effects using the web: A new approach to medical hypothesis generation

[Display omitted] ► We develop a system to extract drug adverse events from medical message boards. ► We validate system over a corpus of breast cancer message posts. ► 75–80% of returned adverse events are documented on the drug label. ► Some of the undocumented adverse events referred to actual us...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of biomedical informatics 2011-12, Vol.44 (6), p.989-996
Main Authors: Benton, Adrian, Ungar, Lyle, Hill, Shawndra, Hennessy, Sean, Mao, Jun, Chung, Annie, Leonard, Charles E., Holmes, John H.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adverse Drug Reaction Reporting Systems
Boards
Data Interpretation, Statistical
Data mining
Drug adverse effect
Drugs
Humans
Information extraction
Internet
Labels
Medical
Medical message board
Messages
On-line systems
Packages
Product Labeling
Semantics
Statistics
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Summary:[Display omitted] ► We develop a system to extract drug adverse events from medical message boards. ► We validate system over a corpus of breast cancer message posts. ► 75–80% of returned adverse events are documented on the drug label. ► Some of the undocumented adverse events referred to actual users experiencing them. ► This could be used as a tool to identify signals of drug adverse events. Medical message boards are online resources where users with a particular condition exchange information, some of which they might not otherwise share with medical providers. Many of these boards contain a large number of posts and contain patient opinions and experiences that would be potentially useful to clinicians and researchers. We present an approach that is able to collect a corpus of medical message board posts, de-identify the corpus, and extract information on potential adverse drug effects discussed by users. Using a corpus of posts to breast cancer message boards, we identified drug event pairs using co-occurrence statistics. We then compared the identified drug event pairs with adverse effects listed on the package labels of tamoxifen, anastrozole, exemestane, and letrozole. Of the pairs identified by our system, 75–80% were documented on the drug labels. Some of the undocumented pairs may represent previously unidentified adverse drug effects.
ISSN:1532-0464
1532-0480
DOI:10.1016/j.jbi.2011.07.005