Evaluating Twitter as a complementary data source for pharmacovigilance

International audienc

Mining Adverse Drug Reactions in Social Media with Named Entity Recognition and Semantic Methods.

International audienceSuspected adverse drug reactions (ADR) reported by patients through social media can be a complementary source to current pharmacovigilance systems. However, the performance of text mining tools applied to social media text data to discover ADRs needs to be evaluated. In this paper, we introduce the approach developed to mine ADR from French social media. A protocol of evaluation is highlighted, which includes a detailed sample size determination and evaluation corpus constitution. Our text mining approach provided very encouraging preliminary results with F-measures of 0.94 and 0.81 for recognition of drugs and symptoms respectively, and with F-measure of 0.70 for ADR detection. Therefore, this approach is promising for downstream pharmacovigilance analysis

The Adverse Drug Reactions From Patient Reports in Social Media Project: Protocol for an Evaluation Against a Gold Standard

International audienceSocial media is a potential source of information on postmarketing drug safety surveillance that still remains unexploited nowadays. Information technology solutions aiming at extracting adverse reactions (ADRs) from posts on health forums require a rigorous evaluation methodology if their results are to be used to make decisions. First, a gold standard, consisting of manual annotations of the ADR by human experts from the corpus extracted from social media, must be implemented and its quality must be assessed. Second, as for clinical research protocols, the sample size must rely on statistical arguments. Finally, the extraction methods must target the relation between the drug and the disease (which might be either treated or caused by the drug) rather than simple co-occurrences in the posts.RR1-10.2196/11448

Mining Adverse Drug Reactions in Social Media with Named Entity Recognition and Semantic Methods.

International audienceSuspected adverse drug reactions (ADR) reported by patients through social media can be a complementary source to current pharmacovigilance systems. However, the performance of text mining tools applied to social media text data to discover ADRs needs to be evaluated. In this paper, we introduce the approach developed to mine ADR from French social media. A protocol of evaluation is highlighted, which includes a detailed sample size determination and evaluation corpus constitution. Our text mining approach provided very encouraging preliminary results with F-measures of 0.94 and 0.81 for recognition of drugs and symptoms respectively, and with F-measure of 0.70 for ADR detection. Therefore, this approach is promising for downstream pharmacovigilance analysis

Mining Adverse Drug Reactions in Social Media with Named Entity Recognition and Semantic Methods.

International audienceSuspected adverse drug reactions (ADR) reported by patients through social media can be a complementary source to current pharmacovigilance systems. However, the performance of text mining tools applied to social media text data to discover ADRs needs to be evaluated. In this paper, we introduce the approach developed to mine ADR from French social media. A protocol of evaluation is highlighted, which includes a detailed sample size determination and evaluation corpus constitution. Our text mining approach provided very encouraging preliminary results with F-measures of 0.94 and 0.81 for recognition of drugs and symptoms respectively, and with F-measure of 0.70 for ADR detection. Therefore, this approach is promising for downstream pharmacovigilance analysis

The Adverse Drug Reactions From Patient Reports in Social Media Project: Protocol for an Evaluation Against a Gold Standard

International audienceSocial media is a potential source of information on postmarketing drug safety surveillance that still remains unexploited nowadays. Information technology solutions aiming at extracting adverse reactions (ADRs) from posts on health forums require a rigorous evaluation methodology if their results are to be used to make decisions. First, a gold standard, consisting of manual annotations of the ADR by human experts from the corpus extracted from social media, must be implemented and its quality must be assessed. Second, as for clinical research protocols, the sample size must rely on statistical arguments. Finally, the extraction methods must target the relation between the drug and the disease (which might be either treated or caused by the drug) rather than simple co-occurrences in the posts.RR1-10.2196/11448

Descriptions of Adverse Drug Reactions are Less Informative in Forums than in the French Pharmacovigilance Database but Provide More Unexpected Reactions

International audienceBackground: In the past years, social media have drawn attention for their potential use in Pharmacovigilance. Recent work showed that it is possible to extract adverse drug reactions (ADRs) in users posts on social media. The main objective of the Vigi4MED project is to evaluate the relevance and quality of the information shared by patients on web forums about drug safety, and its potential usefulness for pharmacovigilance.Methods: After selecting websites of interest, we manually evaluated the relevance of posts content for pharmacovigilance related to 6 drugs (agomelatine, baclofen, duloxetine, exenatide, strontium ranelate and tetrazepam). We compared forums to the French pharmacovigilance database (FPVD) in order to (1) evaluate if they contained relevant information to characterize a pharmacovigilance case report (patient's age and sex; treatment indication, dose and duration; time-to-onset (TTO) and outcome of ADR) and (2) patients age and sex; ADRs nature, seriousness, unexpectedness and outcome; drug dechallenge and rechallenge.Results: The cases in the FPVD were significantly more informative than the posts in forums for patient description (age, sex), treatment description (dose, duration, TTO) and the outcome of the ADR, but indication of the treatment was more often found in forums. Cases were more often serious in the FPVD than in forums (46% vs 4%) but contained more often an unexpected ADR in forums than in the FPVD (24% vs 17%). Moreover, 197 unexpected ADRs identified in forums were absent from the FPVD and the distribution of the MedDRA System Organ Classes (SOCs) was different between both data sources.Discussion: To our knowledge, this study is the first to evaluate how patients posts may qualify as potential and informative case reports to support the pharmacovigilance classical workflow compared to case reports in a pharmacovigilance database. The posts were less informative (except for the indication) and focused on less serious ADRs than the FPVDs cases, but we found more unexpected ADRs in forums than in the FPVD and their SOCs were different. Thus, web forums should be considered as a secondary but complementary source for pharmacovigilance

Descriptions of Adverse Drug Reactions Are Less Informative in Forums Than in the French Pharmacovigilance Database but Provide More Unexpected Reactions

Background: Social media have drawn attention for their potential use in Pharmacovigilance. Recent work showed that it is possible to extract information concerning adverse drug reactions (ADRs) from posts in social media. The main objective of the Vigi4MED project was to evaluate the relevance and quality of the information shared by patients on web forums about drug safety and its potential utility for pharmacovigilance.Methods: After selecting websites of interest, we manually evaluated the relevance of the content of posts for pharmacovigilance related to six drugs (agomelatine, baclofen, duloxetine, exenatide, strontium ranelate, and tetrazepam). We compared forums to the French Pharmacovigilance Database (FPVD) to (1) evaluate whether they contained relevant information to characterize a pharmacovigilance case report (patient’s age and sex; treatment indication, dose and duration; time-to-onset (TTO) and outcome of the ADR, and drug dechallenge and rechallenge) and (2) perform impact analysis (nature, seriousness, unexpectedness, and outcome of the ADR).Results: The cases in the FPVD were significantly more informative than posts in forums for patient description (age, sex), treatment description (dose, duration, TTO), and outcome of the ADR, but the indication for the treatment was more often found in forums. Cases were more often serious in the FPVD than in forums (46% vs. 4%), but forums more often contained an unexpected ADR than the FPVD (24% vs. 17%). Moreover, 197 unexpected ADRs identified in forums were absent from the FPVD and the distribution of the MedDRA System Organ Classes (SOCs) was different between the two data sources.Discussion: This study is the first to evaluate if patients’ posts may qualify as potential and informative case reports that should be stored in a pharmacovigilance database in the same way as case reports submitted by health professionals. The posts were less informative (except for the indication) and focused on less serious ADRs than the FPVD cases, but more unexpected ADRs were presented in forums than in the FPVD and their SOCs were different. Thus, web forums should be considered as a secondary, but complementary source for pharmacovigilance

Descriptions of Adverse Drug Reactions are Less Informative in Forums than in the French Pharmacovigilance Database but Provide More Unexpected Reactions

International audienceBackground: In the past years, social media have drawn attention for their potential use in Pharmacovigilance. Recent work showed that it is possible to extract adverse drug reactions (ADRs) in users’ posts on social media. The main objective of the Vigi4MED project is to evaluate the relevance and quality of the information shared by patients on web forums about drug safety, and its potential usefulness for pharmacovigilance.Methods: After selecting websites of interest, we manually evaluated the relevance of posts’ content for pharmacovigilance related to 6 drugs (agomelatine, baclofen, duloxetine, exenatide, strontium ranelate and tetrazepam). We compared forums to the French pharmacovigilance database (FPVD) in order to (1) evaluate if they contained relevant information to characterize a pharmacovigilance case report (patient's age and sex; treatment indication, dose and duration; time-to-onset (TTO) and outcome of ADR) and (2) patients’ age and sex; ADRs’ nature, seriousness, unexpectedness and outcome; drug dechallenge and rechallenge.Results: The cases in the FPVD were significantly more informative than the posts in forums for patient description (age, sex), treatment description (dose, duration, TTO) and the outcome of the ADR, but indication of the treatment was more often found in forums. Cases were more often serious in the FPVD than in forums (46% vs 4%) but contained more often an unexpected ADR in forums than in the FPVD (24% vs 17%). Moreover, 197 unexpected ADRs identified in forums were absent from the FPVD and the distribution of the MedDRA System Organ Classes (SOCs) was different between both data sources.Discussion: To our knowledge, this study is the first to evaluate how patients’ posts may qualify as potential and informative case reports to support the pharmacovigilance classical workflow compared to case reports in a pharmacovigilance database. The posts were less informative (except for the indication) and focused on less serious ADRs than the FPVD’s cases, but we found more unexpected ADRs in forums than in the FPVD and their SOCs were different. Thus, web forums should be considered as a secondary but complementary source for pharmacovigilance