Causal Evaluation of Post-Marketing Drugs for Drug-induced Liver Injury from Electronic Health Records.

Abstract

Drug-induced liver injury (DILI) is one of the most common and serious adverse drug reactions that can lead to acute liver failure and death. Detection of DILI and causal estimation of drug-hepatotoxicity association are of great importance for patient safety. This paper proposes a framework for causal estimation of post-marketing drugs for DILI from real-world electronic health record (EHR) data. Randomized clinical trials were replicated at scale by automatically generating different user and non-user cohorts for each potential drug, and average treatment effects (ATEs) of drugs were estimated using targeted maximum likelihood estimation. Ten years of real-world EHRs were used to validate the framework. Of all 1199 single-ingredient drugs analyzed, 7 novel and 7 known drug-hepatotoxicity associations were found to be causal.