Profiling Off-label Prescriptions in Cancer Treatment Using Social Health Networks

Overview

Journal JAMIA Open

Date 2019 Nov 12

PMID 31709388

Citations 2

Authors

Azadeh Nikfarjam

Julia D Ransohoff

Alison Callahan

Vladimir Polony

Nigam H Shah

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Objectives: To investigate using patient posts in social media as a resource to profile off-label prescriptions of cancer drugs.

Methods: We analyzed patient posts from the Inspire health forums (www.inspire.com) and extracted mentions of cancer drugs from the 14 most active cancer-type specific support groups. To quantify drug-disease associations, we calculated information component scores from the frequency of posts in each cancer-specific group with mentions of a given drug. We evaluated the results against three sources: manual review, Wolters-Kluwer Medi-span, and Truven MarketScan insurance claims.

Results: We identified 279 frequently discussed and therefore highly associated drug-disease pairs from Inspire posts. Of these, 96 are FDA approved, 9 are known off-label uses, and 174 do not have records of known usage (potentially novel off-label uses). We achieved a mean average precision of 74.9% in identifying drug-disease pairs with a true indication association from patient posts and found consistent evidence in medical claims records. We achieved a recall of 69.2% in identifying known off-label drug uses (based on Wolters-Kluwer Medi-span) from patient posts.

Citing Articles

Application of natural language processing techniques to identify off-label drug usage from various online health communities.

Dreyfus B, Chaudhary A, Bhardwaj P, Shree V J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2021; 28(10):2147-2154.

PMID: 34333625 PMC: 8449611. DOI: 10.1093/jamia/ocab124.

Strategies for Testing Intervention Matching Schemes in Cancer.

Schork N, Goetz L, Lowey J, Trent J Clin Pharmacol Ther. 2020; 108(3):542-552.

PMID: 32535886 PMC: 7901602. DOI: 10.1002/cpt.1947.

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