New system for detecting adverse effects of medications using social media

A new system for detecting adverse effects of pharmaceutical drugs tracks information generated by patients on specialized blogs or social networks such as Twitter in real time. The researchers explain that online health information searches are the third most popular activity in Google, with 170,000 searches performed every 5 seconds. "There is a lot of user-generated information these days, so social networks can be a valuable source of information on adverse effects of pharmaceutical drugs after the clinical trial stage is over and the drug is on the market." ...read more