Evolving language of pediatric anxiety in electronic health records

This study aimed to identify and quantify semantic drift (ie, the change in semantic meaning over time) within expert-defined anxiety-related (AR) terminology and compare it to common electronic health record (EHR) vocabulary across longitudinal pediatric clinical notes.

A corpus of pediatric clinical notes from 2009 to 2022 was analyzed using computational methods. Semantic drift for each term was quantified using cosine similarity between annual temporal word embeddings. Contextual meaning was examined through changes in nearest neighbors across years. The Laws of Semantic Change were applied to assess the influence of word frequency and polysemy. Vocabulary terms were categorized as AR or common EHR.

98% of AR terminology maintained a cosine similarity between 0.00 and 0.50, indicating moderate semantic stability, whereas 90% of common EHR terms remained between 0.00 and 0.25, showing greater contextual stability overall. Frequent terms exhibited minimal change (Frequency Coefficient = 0.04), whereas highly polysemous or abbreviated terms showed less stability (Polysemy Coefficient = 0.630). AR terminology drifted more slowly than general EHR vocabulary (Type Coefficient = -0.179), further supported by significant year-type interactions (Coef = -0.09 to -0.523).

Although anxiety-related terminology demonstrates slower semantic drift than general EHR vocabulary, subtle contextual shifts still occur that may affect downstream interpretability and retrieval in automated systems.

Continuous linguistic monitoring and adaptive modeling are essential to maintain semantic fidelity and ensure the long-term reliability of clinical decision support systems as healthcare documentation evolves.