Abstract
In recent years, social media websites have been suggested as a novel, vast source of data which may be useful for deriving drug safety information. Despite this, there are few published reports of drug safety profiles derived in this way. The aims of this study were to detect and quantify glucocorticoid-related adverse events using a computerised system for automated detection of suspected adverse drug reactions (ADR) from narrative text in Twitter, and to compare the frequency of specific ADR mentions within Twitter to the frequency and patterns of spontaneous ADR reporting to a national drug regulatory body. Of 159,297 tweets mentioning either prednisolone or prednisone between 1st October 2012 and 30th June 2015, 20,206 tweets were deemed to contain information resembling an ADR. The top AE MedDRA® Preferred Terms were ‘insomnia’ and ‘weight increased’, both recognised non-serious but common side effects. These were proportionally over-reported in Twitter when compared to spontaneous reports in the UK regulator’s ADR reporting scheme. Serious glucocorticoid related AEs were reported less frequently. Pharmacovigilance using Twitter data has the potential to be a valuable, supplementary source of drug safety information. In particular, it can illustrate which drug side effects patients discuss most commonly, potentially because of important impacts on quality of life. This information could help clinicians to inform patients about frequent and relevant non-serious side effects as well as more serious side effects.
Highlights
Glucocorticoid (GC) therapy is used widely in patients with inflammatory diseases
All remaining 113,827 tweets were fed through the automated processor. 81,524 distinct tweets remained after duplicate tweets were removed
After filtering out 17 non-medical event preferred terms (PTs) and 41 treatment indications (Supplementary Tables 1 and 2), 20,210 PTs within 15,730 tweets remained, including 289 unique PTs. 12,132 (77%) tweets were tagged with one relevant PT. 2489 were tagged with two, 856 with three, whilst one tweet was tagged with nine PTs (Fig. 2)
Summary
Glucocorticoid (GC) therapy is used widely in patients with inflammatory diseases. It is estimated that the prevalence of oral GC use in the UK population is around 1%.1 Their powerful therapeutic benefit is, offset by potential adverse events acting through non-selective disruption of immunological and metabolic processes. It is estimated that the prevalence of oral GC use in the UK population is around 1%.1 Their powerful therapeutic benefit is, offset by potential adverse events acting through non-selective disruption of immunological and metabolic processes. Clinicians and patients are known to have differing views on what the important side effects of GC therapy are. Given that clinician–patient disconnect and treatment concerns are two key factors in influencing medication adherence,[9,10] further work which focuses on patient experience and opinion is needed to develop a more complete understanding of GC safety
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