Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 8, 2025

A Metadata Extraction Approach for Clinical Case Reports to Enable Advanced Understanding of Biomedical Concepts
Published on: September 20, 2018
Identifying adverse drug reactions from patient reviews on social media using natural language processing
1Faculty of Computer Science, 3688Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada.
Abstract:
Drugs have the potential of causing adverse reactions or side effects and prior knowledge of these reactions can help prevent hospitalizations and premature deaths. Public databases of common adverse drug reactions (ADRs) depend on individual reports from drug manufacturers and health professionals. However, this passive approach to ADR surveillance has been shown to suffer from severe under-reporting. Social media, such as online health forums where patients across the globe willingly share their drug intake experience, is a viable and rich source for detecting unreported ADRs. In this paper, we design an ADR Detection Framework (ADF) using Natural Language Processing techniques to identify ADRs in drug reviews mined from social media. We demonstrate the applicability of ADF in the domain of Diabetes by identifying ADRs associated with diabetes drugs using data extracted from three online patient-based health forums: askapatient.com, webmd.com, and iodine.com. Next, we analyze and visualize the ADRs identified and present valuable insights including prevalent and less prevalent ADRs, age and gender differences in ADRs detected, as well as the previously unknown ADRs detected by our framework. Our work could promote active (real-time) ADR surveillance and also advance pharmacovigilance research.
Related Concept Videos
Pharmacovigilance
This process, termed pharmacovigilance, aims to detect, evaluate, and minimize harmful effects related to medication use. The data collection for pharmacovigilance depends on spontaneous reporting systems, where healthcare professionals or patients voluntarily report suspected ADRs.
In some cases, there...
Allergic Drug Reactions
Factors Affecting Drug Response: Overview
Drug-Receptor Interactions
Several parameters, such as the drug's affinity for its receptor and its efficacy, which is its ability to activate the receptor, determine the drug's effect on the tissue....
Drug-Receptor Interaction: Antagonist
Antagonists can be classified as competitive or noncompetitive based on their...
Drug Nomenclature

