title: Postmarket drug surveillance without trial costs: discovery of adverse drug reactions through large-scale analysis of web search queries.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Postmarket drug safety surveillance largely depends on spontaneous reports by patients and health care providers; hence, less common adverse drug reactions--especially those caused by long-term exposure, multidrug treatments, or those specific to special populations--often elude discovery.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  Here we propose a low cost, fully automated method for continuous monitoring of adverse drug reactions in single drugs and in combinations thereof, and demonstrate the discovery of heretofore-unknown ones.
  
  
  METHODS
  We used aggregated search data of large populations of Internet users to extract information related to drugs and adverse reactions to them, and correlated these data over time. We further extended our method to identify adverse reactions to combinations of drugs.
  
  
  RESULTS
  We validated our method by showing high correlations of our findings with known adverse drug reactions (ADRs). However, although acute early-onset drug reactions are more likely to be reported to regulatory agencies, we show that less acute later-onset ones are better captured in Web search queries.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Our method is advantageous in identifying previously unknown adverse drug reactions. These ADRs should be considered as candidates for further scrutiny by medical regulatory authorities, for example, through phase 4 trials.
authors.affiliation: Yahoo Research, New York, NY 10018, USA. eladyt@yahoo.com
authors.forename: Elad
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Yom-Tov
authors.forename: Evgeniy
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Gabrilovich
mesh_terms: D002986:Clinical Trials as Topic / Q000191:economics*; D064420:Drug-Related Side Effects and Adverse Reactions; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D011358:Product Surveillance, Postmarketing
keywords: infodemiology; information retrieval; infoveillance; machine learning; side effects