Adverse Reactions Associated With Cannabis Consumption As Evident From Search Engine Queries

Overview

Journal JMIR Public Health Surveill

Publisher JMIR Publications

Date 2017 Oct 28

PMID 29074469

Citations 9

Authors

Elad Yom-Tov

Shaul Lev-Ran

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Background: Cannabis is one of the most widely used psychoactive substances worldwide, but adverse drug reactions (ADRs) associated with its use are difficult to study because of its prohibited status in many countries.

Objective: Internet search engine queries have been used to investigate ADRs in pharmaceutical drugs. In this proof-of-concept study, we tested whether these queries can be used to detect the adverse reactions of cannabis use.

Methods: We analyzed anonymized queries from US-based users of Bing, a widely used search engine, made over a period of 6 months and compared the results with the prevalence of cannabis use as reported in the US National Survey on Drug Use in the Household (NSDUH) and with ADRs reported in the Food and Drug Administration's Adverse Drug Reporting System. Predicted prevalence of cannabis use was estimated from the fraction of people making queries about cannabis, marijuana, and 121 additional synonyms. Predicted ADRs were estimated from queries containing layperson descriptions to 195 ICD-10 symptoms list.

Results: Our results indicated that the predicted prevalence of cannabis use at the US census regional level reaches an R of .71 NSDUH data. Queries for ADRs made by people who also searched for cannabis reveal many of the known adverse effects of cannabis (eg, cough and psychotic symptoms), as well as plausible unknown reactions (eg, pyrexia).

Conclusions: These results indicate that search engine queries can serve as an important tool for the study of adverse reactions of illicit drugs, which are difficult to study in other settings.

Citing Articles

Using Social Media Data to Investigate Public Perceptions of Cannabis as a Medicine: Narrative Review.

Khademi S, Hallinan C, Conway M, Bonomo Y J Med Internet Res. 2023; 25:e36667.

PMID: 36848191 PMC: 10012004. DOI: 10.2196/36667.

Social media discourse and internet search queries on cannabis as a medicine: A systematic scoping review.

Hallinan C, Khademi Habibabadi S, Conway M, Bonomo Y PLoS One. 2023; 18(1):e0269143.

PMID: 36662832 PMC: 9858862. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0269143.

Consumer-Generated Discourse on Cannabis as a Medicine: Scoping Review of Techniques.

Khademi Habibabadi S, Hallinan C, Bonomo Y, Conway M J Med Internet Res. 2022; 24(11):e35974.

PMID: 36383417 PMC: 9713623. DOI: 10.2196/35974.

Identifying Health-Related Discussions of Cannabis Use on Twitter by Using a Medical Dictionary: Content Analysis of Tweets.

Allem J, Majmundar A, Dormanesh A, Donaldson S JMIR Form Res. 2022; 6(2):e35027.

PMID: 35212637 PMC: 8917433. DOI: 10.2196/35027.

Analysis of a Vaping-Associated Lung Injury Outbreak through Participatory Surveillance and Archival Internet Data.

Hswen Y, Yom-Tov E Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2021; 18(15).

PMID: 34360495 PMC: 8346109. DOI: 10.3390/ijerph18158203.

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