title: Patient stratification and identification of adverse event correlations in the space of 1190 drug related adverse events.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  New pharmacovigilance methods are needed as a consequence of the morbidity caused by drugs. We exploit fine-grained drug related adverse event information extracted by text mining from electronic medical records (EMRs) to stratify patients based on their adverse events and to determine adverse event co-occurrences.
  
  
  METHODS
  We analyzed the similarity of adverse event profiles of 2347 patients extracted from EMRs from a mental health center in Denmark. The patients were clustered based on their adverse event profiles and the similarities were presented as a network. The set of adverse events in each main patient cluster was evaluated. Co-occurrences of adverse events in patients (p-value < 0.01) were identified and presented as well.
  
  
  RESULTS
  We found that each cluster of patients typically had a most distinguishing adverse event. Examination of the co-occurrences of adverse events in patients led to the identification of potentially interesting adverse event correlations that may be further investigated as well as provide further patient stratification opportunities.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  We have demonstrated the feasibility of a novel approach in pharmacovigilance to stratify patients based on fine-grained adverse event profiles, which also makes it possible to identify adverse event correlations. Used on larger data sets, this data-driven method has the potential to reveal unknown patterns concerning adverse event occurrences.
authors.affiliation: Department of Disease Systems Biology, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research, University of Copenhagen Copenhagen, Denmark ; Department of Systems Biology, Center for Biological Sequence Analysis, Technical University of Denmark Lyngby, Denmark.
authors.forename: Eva
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Roitmann
authors.affiliation: Department of Disease Systems Biology, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research, University of Copenhagen Copenhagen, Denmark ; Department of Systems Biology, Center for Biological Sequence Analysis, Technical University of Denmark Lyngby, Denmark.
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Eriksson
authors.affiliation: Department of Disease Systems Biology, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research, University of Copenhagen Copenhagen, Denmark ; Department of Systems Biology, Center for Biological Sequence Analysis, Technical University of Denmark Lyngby, Denmark.
authors.forename: Søren
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Brunak
keywords: adverse drugs reactions; adverse events; data mining; electronic medical records; network analysis; patient stratification