Adverse Drug Reaction Identification and Extraction in Social Media: A Scoping Review

Abstract

BackgroundThe underreporting of adverse drug reactions (ADRs) through traditional reporting channels is a limitation in the efficiency of the current pharmacovigilance system. Patients’ experiences with drugs that they report on social media represent a new source of data that may have some value in postmarketing safety surveillance.ObjectiveA scoping review was undertaken to explore the breadth of evidence about the use of social media as a new source of knowledge for pharmacovigilance.MethodsDaubt et al’s recommendations for scoping reviews were followed. The research questions were as follows: How can social media be used as a data source for postmarketing drug surveillance? What are the available methods for extracting data? What are the different ways to use these data? We queried PubMed, Embase, and Google Scholar to extract relevant articles that were published before June 2014 and with no lower date limit. Two pairs of reviewers independently screened the selected studies and proposed two themes of review: manual ADR identification (theme 1) and automated ADR extraction from social media (theme 2). Descriptive characteristics were collected from the publications to create a database for themes 1 and 2.ResultsOf the 1032 citations from PubMed and Embase, 11 were relevant to the research question. An additional 13 citations were added after further research on the Internet and in reference lists. Themes 1 and 2 explored 11 and 13 articles, respectively. Ways of approaching the use of social media as a pharmacovigilance data source were identified.ConclusionsThis scoping review noted multiple methods for identifying target data, extracting them, and evaluating the quality of medical information from social media. It also showed some remaining gaps in the field. Studies related to the identification theme usually failed to accurately assess the completeness, quality, and reliability of the data that were analyzed from social media. Regarding extraction, no study proposed a generic approach to easily adding a new site or data source. Additional studies are required to precisely determine the role of social media in the pharmacovigilance system.

Using Social Media Data in Routine Pharmacovigilance: A Pilot Study to Identify Safety Signals and Patient Perspectives

“…A variety of studies have sought to determine the value of social media data in the context of traditional pharmacovigilance (PV) methodologies [1][2][3][4]. These studies have also tried to advance the analysis of social media data to Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s40290-017-0186-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.…”

“…These studies have also tried to advance the analysis of social media data to Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s40290-017-0186-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. improve its use for monitoring the safety of drugs and devices [1][2][3][4]. The use of social media data for tracking 'posts with resemblance to adverse events' (proto-AEs) is an evolving science within PV [3].…”

“…Powell et al [1] recently analyzed social media data to identify untapped safety and benefit information and found that social media data were suitable for post-marketing safety surveillance and product benefits. However, a recurring challenge amongst others analyzing social media data for AEs includes transforming the freetext format of posts and non-text entries (such as emojis) into clinically meaningful information in a structured data format [1,2,5,6]. Natural language processing (NLP) is the main method for transforming the content of social media posts into meaningful information and is continuing to evolve to improve the accuracy of post categorization [6][7][8][9].…”

Detection of Cases of Noncompliance to Drug Treatment in Patient Forum Posts: Topic Model Approach (Preprint)

“…The use of social media allows large groups of people to create and share information, opinions, and experiences about health conditions and medications through online communications [5]. Social media provide pharmacovigilance experts with a relevant source of information [6]. The example of benfluorex [7] illustrated how social media could be valuable sources for experts.…”

Feature Engineering for Recognizing Adverse Drug Reactions from Twitter Posts

“…Even though drugs are monitored in clinical trials for safety prior to approval and marketing, not all ADRs are reported due to the short duration and number of patients registered in clinical trials. Therefore, post marketing surveillance of ADRs is of utmost importance [1,2]. Reporting of ADRs is commonly done by medical practitioners.…”