Unreported Drug Side Effects Are Found With Internet Searches
March 14th, 2013 // 3:32 am @ marquee
March 14, 2013
Don’t Put Your Pharma Company in LA?
This is a bit unsettling. According to a recent New York Times article, using search data that was pulled from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, scientists at Columbia, Stanford and Microsoft were able to find evidence of drug side effects that had not yet been reported. The side effects had not yet been detected by FDA’s warning system.
The researchers used automatic software tools to comb through searches by six million Web users. They were derived from Web search logs in 2011. The investigators were searching for queries that were related to an antidepressant and a drug that lowers cholesterol. The scientists were able to discover that the combination of these drugs caused some cases of elevated blood sugar.
The study was reported in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Assn this week. It was based upon advanced data mining techniques that are similar to the ones used by Google Flue Trends. That site has been able to provide early warnings of flu out breaks to the public.
 Inspection Tip – Avoid a CAPA Reporting Disaster!
