title: Design and validation of an automated method to detect known adverse drug reactions in MEDLINE: a contribution from the EU-ADR project.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  The aim of this research was to automate the search of publications concerning adverse drug reactions (ADR) by defining the queries used to search MEDLINE and by determining the required threshold for the number of extracted publications to confirm the drug/event association in the literature.
  
  
  METHODS
  We defined an approach based on the medical subject headings (MeSH) 'descriptor records' and 'supplementary concept records' thesaurus, using the subheadings 'chemically induced' and 'adverse effects' with the 'pharmacological action' knowledge. An expert-built validation set of true positive and true negative drug/adverse event associations (n=61) was used to validate our method.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Using a threshold of three of more extracted publications, the automated search method presented a sensitivity of 90% and a specificity of 100%. For nine different drug/event pairs selected, the recall of the automated search ranged from 24% to 64% and the precision from 93% to 48%.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  This work presents a method to find previously established relationships between drugs and adverse events in the literature. Using MEDLINE, following a MeSH approach to filter the signals, is a valid option. Our contribution is available as a web service that will be integrated in the final European EU-ADR project (Exploring and Understanding Adverse Drug Reactions by integrative mining of clinical records and biomedical knowledge) automated system.
authors.affiliation: LESIM, ISPED, University of Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France. avillach@mac.com
authors.forename: Paul
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Avillach
authors.forename: Jean-Charles
authors.initials: JC
authors.lastname: Dufour
authors.forename: Gayo
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Diallo
authors.forename: Francesco
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Salvo
authors.forename: Michel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Joubert
authors.forename: Frantz
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Thiessard
authors.forename: Fleur
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Mougin
authors.forename: Gianluca
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Trifirò
authors.forename: Annie
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Fourrier-Réglat
authors.forename: Antoine
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Pariente
authors.forename: Marius
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Fieschi
mesh_terms: D064420:Drug-Related Side Effects and Adverse Reactions; D005060:Europe; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D020407:Internet; D016239:MEDLINE; D046650:Medical Subject Headings