Predicting adverse drug events from personal health messages

Adverse drug events (ADEs) remain a large problem in the United States, being the fourth leading cause of death, despite post market drug surveillance. Much post consumer drug surveillance relies on self-reported "spontaneous" patient data. Previous work has performed datamining over the FDA's Adverse Event Reporting System (AERS) and other spontaneous reporting systems to identify drug interactions and drugs correlated with high rates of serious adverse events. However, safety problems have resulted from the lack of post marketing surveillance information about drugs, with underreporting rates of up to 98% within such systems. We explore the use of online health forums as a source of data to identify drugs for further FDA scrutiny. In this work we aggregate individuals' opinions and review of drugs similar to crowd intelligence3. We use natural language processing to group drugs discussed in similar ways and are able to successfully identify drugs withdrawn from the market based on messages discussing them before their removal.