Early Detection of Adverse Drug Reactions in Social Health Networks: A Natural Language Processing Pipeline for Signal Detection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) occur in nearly all patients on chemotherapy, causing morbidity and therapy disruptions. Detection of such ADRs is limited in clinical trials, which are underpowered to detect rare events. Early recognition of ADRs in the postmarketing phase could substantially reduce morbidity and decrease societal costs. Internet community health forums provide a mechanism for individuals to discuss real-time health concerns and can enable computational detection of ADRs. OBJECTIVE: The goal of this study is to identify cutaneous ADR signals in social health networks and compare the frequency and timing of these ADRs to clinical reports in the literature. METHODS: We present a natural language processing-based, ADR signal-generation pipeline based on patient posts on Internet social health networks. We identified user posts from the Inspire health forums related to two chemotherapy classes: erlotinib, an epidermal growth factor receptor inhibitor, and nivolumab and pembrolizumab, immune checkpoint inhibitors. We extracted mentions of ADRs from unstructured content of patient posts. We then performed population-level association analyses and time-to-detection analyses. RESULTS: Our system detected cutaneous ADRs from patient reports with high precision (0.90) and at frequencies comparable to those documented in the literature but an average of 7 months ahead of their literature reporting. Known ADRs were associated with higher proportional reporting ratios compared to negative controls, demonstrating the robustness of our analyses. Our named entity recognition system achieved a 0.738 microaveraged F-measure in detecting ADR entities, not limited to cutaneous ADRs, in health forum posts. Additionally, we discovered the novel ADR of hypohidrosis reported by 23 patients in erlotinib-related posts; this ADR was absent from 15 years of literature on this medication and we recently reported the finding in a clinical oncology journal. CONCLUSIONS: Several hundred million patients report health concerns in social health networks, yet this information is markedly underutilized for pharmacosurveillance. We demonstrated the ability of a natural language processing-based signal-generation pipeline to accurately detect patient reports of ADRs months in advance of literature reporting and the robustness of statistical analyses to validate system detections. Our findings suggest the important contributions that social health network data can play in contributing to more comprehensive and timely pharmacovigilance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".