Elsevier

Journal of Biomedical Informatics

Volume 57, October 2015, Pages 425-435
Journal of Biomedical Informatics

Leveraging MEDLINE indexing for pharmacovigilance – Inherent limitations and mitigation strategies

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbi.2015.08.022Get rights and content
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Highlight

  • We demonstrate significant improvement over a baseline approach to identifying ADEs from MEDLINE indexing.

  • This approach mitigates some of the inherent limitations of MEDLINE indexing for pharmacovigilance.

  • ADEs extracted from MEDLINE indexing are complementary to, not a replacement for, other sources.

Abstract

Background

Traditional approaches to pharmacovigilance center on the signal detection from spontaneous reports, e.g., the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) adverse event reporting system (FAERS). In order to enrich the scientific evidence and enhance the detection of emerging adverse drug events that can lead to unintended harmful outcomes, pharmacovigilance activities need to evolve to encompass novel complementary data streams, for example the biomedical literature available through MEDLINE.

Objectives

(1) To review how the characteristics of MEDLINE indexing influence the identification of adverse drug events (ADEs); (2) to leverage this knowledge to inform the design of a system for extracting ADEs from MEDLINE indexing; and (3) to assess the specific contribution of some characteristics of MEDLINE indexing to the performance of this system.

Methods

We analyze the characteristics of MEDLINE indexing. We integrate three specific characteristics into the design of a system for extracting ADEs from MEDLINE indexing. We experimentally assess the specific contribution of these characteristics over a baseline system based on co-occurrence between drug descriptors qualified by adverse effects and disease descriptors qualified by chemically induced.

Results

Our system extracted 405,300 ADEs from 366,120 MEDLINE articles. The baseline system accounts for 297,093 ADEs (73%). 85,318 ADEs (21%) can be extracted only after integrating specific pre-coordinated MeSH descriptors and additional qualifiers. 22,889 ADEs (6%) can be extracted only after considering indirect links between the drug of interest and the descriptor that bears the ADE context.

Conclusions

In this paper, we demonstrate significant improvement over a baseline approach to identifying ADEs from MEDLINE indexing, which mitigates some of the inherent limitations of MEDLINE indexing for pharmacovigilance. ADEs extracted from MEDLINE indexing are complementary to, not a replacement for, other sources.

Keywords

MEDLINE indexing
Pharmacovigilance
Adverse drug events

Cited by (0)

1

Current address: Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-5479, USA.