Abstract
ObjectiveThe abundance of text available in social media and health related forums along with the rich expression of public opinion have recently attracted the interest of the public health community to use these sources for pharmacovigilance. Based on the intuition that patients post about Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs) expressing negative sentiments, we investigate the effect of sentiment analysis features in locating ADR mentions. MethodsWe enrich the feature space of a state-of-the-art ADR identification method with sentiment analysis features. Using a corpus of posts from the DailyStrength forum and tweets annotated for ADR and indication mentions, we evaluate the extent to which sentiment analysis features help in locating ADR mentions and distinguishing them from indication mentions. ResultsEvaluation results show that sentiment analysis features marginally improve ADR identification in tweets and health related forum posts. Adding sentiment analysis features achieved a statistically significant F-measure increase from 72.14% to 73.22% in the Twitter part of an existing corpus using its original train/test split. Using stratified 10×10-fold cross-validation, statistically significant F-measure increases were shown in the DailyStrength part of the corpus, from 79.57% to 80.14%, and in the Twitter part of the corpus, from 66.91% to 69.16%. Moreover, sentiment analysis features are shown to reduce the number of ADRs being recognized as indications. ConclusionThis study shows that adding sentiment analysis features can marginally improve the performance of even a state-of-the-art ADR identification method. This improvement can be of use to pharmacovigilance practice, due to the rapidly increasing popularity of social media and health forums.
Highlights
Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs) are among major public health concerns and one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality [1]
We investigate whether sentiment analysis features help to distinguish between indications mentions and ADR mentions and whether sentiment analysis features can help in locating posts that contain ADRs
We hypothesized that, in online posts, ADR mentions are associated with negative sentiment
Summary
Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs) are among major public health concerns and one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality [1]. The efficiency and safety of drugs are tested during clinical trials, many ADRs remain undiscovered and may only be revealed under specific conditions such as: after long-term use, when used in conjunction with other drugs, or when used by patients who were excluded from the trials such as adults with. Spontaneous reporting systems (SRS) are monitoring mechanisms established and supported by regulatory agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration in the United States. These surveillance mechanisms enable both patients and healthcare providers to report suspected ADRs. it is estimated that more than 90% of the ADRs still remain unreported, showing the limited effectiveness of SRS [2]
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