Unreported Drug Side Effects Found In Web Search Data

Featured Article Academic Journal Main Category: IT / Internet / E-mail Also Included In: Pharmacy / Pharmacist;Pharma Industry / Biotech Industry Article Date: 14 Mar 2013 - 3:00 PDT

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They report their findings in the 6 March online issue of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

Co-author Russ Altman is professor of bioengineering, of genetics and of medicine at Stanford. He says in a statement:

"Seeking health information is a major use of the Internet now. So we thought people are likely typing in drugs they are taking and the side effects they are experiencing and that there must be a way for us to use this data."

So there is an urgent need to find fast and accurate ways of discovering whether drugs either on their own or in combination have unexpected side effects.

In the US the Food and Drug Administration runs a scheme called the Adverse Event Reporting System (AERS) where doctors can report side effects. But the scheme is voluntary and does not necessarily capture all instances of where patients or doctors notice an unusual side effect.

A paper published in 2010 showed that looking at the location and frequency of internet searches related to flu and its symptoms followed the spread of flu in the US as accurately as the hospital-tracking method used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

And in 2012, two researchers took this a stage further when they revealed a new flu forecasting model using Google's Flu Trends that predicts regional peaks in flu outbreaks more than 7 weeks ahead.

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Unreported Drug Side Effects Found In Web Search Data