Assessment of the Utility of Social Media for Broad-Ranging Statistical Signal Detection in Pharmacovigilance: Results from the WEB-RADR Project.

ABSTRACT:

Introduction and objective

Social media has been proposed as a possibly useful data source for pharmacovigilance signal detection. This study primarily aimed to evaluate the performance of established statistical signal detection algorithms in Twitter/Facebook for a broad range of drugs and adverse events.

Methods

Performance was assessed using a reference set by Harpaz et al., consisting of 62 US Food and Drug Administration labelling changes, and an internal WEB-RADR reference set consisting of 200 validated safety signals. In total, 75 drugs were studied. Twitter/Facebook posts were retrieved for the period March 2012 to March 2015, and drugs/events were extracted from the posts. We retrieved 4.3 million and 2.0 million posts for the WEB-RADR and Harpaz drugs, respectivel

SUBMITTER: Caster O 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6223695 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature