Evaluation of Facebook and Twitter Monitoring to Detect Safety Signals for Medical Products: An Analysis of Recent FDA Safety Alerts.

ABSTRACT:

Introduction

The rapid expansion of the Internet and computing power in recent years has opened up the possibility of using social media for pharmacovigilance. While this general concept has been proposed by many, central questions remain as to whether social media can provide earlier warnings for rare and serious events than traditional signal detection from spontaneous report data.

Objective

Our objective was to examine whether specific product-adverse event pairs were reported via social media before being reported to the US FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS).

Methods

A retrospective analysis of public Facebook and Twitter data was conducted for 10 recent FDA postmarketing safety signals at the drug-event pair level with six negative controls. Social media

SUBMITTER: Pierce CE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5362648 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature