Dataset Information

Adverse Reactions Associated With Cannabis Consumption as Evident From Search Engine Queries.

ABSTRACT: 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.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.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.Our results indicated that the predicted prevalence of cannabis use at the US census regional level reaches an R2 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).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.

SUBMITTER: Yom-Tov E

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5680525 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Adverse Reactions Associated With Cannabis Consumption as Evident From Search Engine Queries.

Yom-Tov Elad E Lev-Ran Shaul S

JMIR public health and surveillance 20171026 4

<h4>Background</h4>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.<h4>Objective</h4>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.<h4>Methods</h4>We analyzed anonymized qu ...[more]

PMID: 29074469

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Project description:BackgroundStroke is a major cause of death and the need for nursing care in Japan, with large regional disparities.ObjectiveThe purpose of this study was to clarify the association between stroke-related information retrieval behavior and age-adjusted mortality in each prefecture in Japan.MethodsAge-adjusted mortality from stroke and aging rates were obtained from publicly available Japanese government statistics. A total of 9476 abstracts of Japanese articles related to symptoms and signs of stroke were identified in Ichushi-Web, a Japanese web-based database of biomedical articles, and 100 highly frequent words (hereafter referred to as the Stroke 100) were extracted. Using data from 2014 to 2019, a random forest analysis was carried out using the age-adjusted mortality from stroke in 47 prefectures as the outcome variable and the standardized retrieval numbers of the Stroke 100 words in the log data of Yahoo! JAPAN Search as predictive variables. Regression analysis was performed using a generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) with the number of standardized searches for Stroke 100 words with high importance scores in the random forest model as the predictive variable. In the GLMM, the aging rate and data year were used as control variables, and the random slope of data year and random intercept were calculated by prefecture.ResultsThe mean age-adjusted mortality from stroke was 28.07 (SD 4.55) deaths per 100,000 for all prefectures in all data years. The accuracy score of the random forest analysis was 89.94%, the average error was 2.79 degrees, and the mean squared error was 13.57 degrees. The following 9 variables with high importance scores in the random forest analysis were selected as predictive variables for the regression analysis: male, age, hospitalization, enforcement, progress, stroke, abnormal, use, and change. As a result of the regression analysis with GLMM, the standardized partial regression coefficients (β) and 95% confidence intervals showed that the following internet search terms were significantly associated with age-adjusted mortality from stroke: male (β=-5.83, 95% CI -8.67 to -3.29), age (β=-5.83, 95% CI -8.67 to -3.29), hospitalization (β=-5.83, 95% CI -8.67 to -3.29), and abnormal (β=3.83, 95% CI 1.14 to 6.56).ConclusionsStroke-related search behavior was associated with age-adjusted mortality from stroke in each prefecture in Japan. Query terms that were strongly associated with age-adjusted mortality rates of stroke suggested the possibility that individual characteristics, such as sex and age, have an impact on stroke-associated mortality and that it is important to receive medical care early after stroke onset. Further studies on the criteria and timing of alerting are needed by monitoring information-seeking behavior to identify queries that are strongly associated with stroke mortality.

Project description:The use of cannabis for medicinal purposes has increased globally over the past decade since patient access to medicinal cannabis has been legislated across jurisdictions in Europe, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and Australia. Yet, evidence relating to the effect of medical cannabis on the management of symptoms for a suite of conditions is only just emerging. Although there is considerable engagement from many stakeholders to add to the evidence base through randomized controlled trials, many gaps in the literature remain. Data from real-world and patient reported sources can provide opportunities to address this evidence deficit. This real-world data can be captured from a variety of sources such as found in routinely collected health care and health services records that include but are not limited to patient generated data from medical, administrative and claims data, patient reported data from surveys, wearable trackers, patient registries, and social media. In this systematic scoping review, we seek to understand the utility of online user generated text into the use of cannabis as a medicine. In this scoping review, we aimed to systematically search published literature to examine the extent, range, and nature of research that utilises user-generated content to examine to cannabis as a medicine. The objective of this methodological review is to synthesise primary research that uses social media discourse and internet search engine queries to answer the following questions: (i) In what way, is online user-generated text used as a data source in the investigation of cannabis as a medicine? (ii) What are the aims, data sources, methods, and research themes of studies using online user-generated text to discuss the medicinal use of cannabis. We conducted a manual search of primary research studies which used online user-generated text as a data source using the MEDLINE, Embase, Web of Science, and Scopus databases in October 2022. Editorials, letters, commentaries, surveys, protocols, and book chapters were excluded from the review. Forty-two studies were included in this review, twenty-two studies used manually labelled data, four studies used existing meta-data (Google trends/geo-location data), two studies used data that was manually coded using crowdsourcing services, and two used automated coding supplied by a social media analytics company, fifteen used computational methods for annotating data. Our review reflects a growing interest in the use of user-generated content for public health surveillance. It also demonstrates the need for the development of a systematic approach for evaluating the quality of social media studies and highlights the utility of automatic processing and computational methods (machine learning technologies) for large social media datasets. This systematic scoping review has shown that user-generated content as a data source for studying cannabis as a medicine provides another means to understand how cannabis is perceived and used in the community. As such, it provides another potential 'tool' with which to engage in pharmacovigilance of, not only cannabis as a medicine, but also other novel therapeutics as they enter the market.

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Adverse Reactions Associated With Cannabis Consumption as Evident From Search Engine Queries.

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Adverse Reactions Associated With Cannabis Consumption as Evident From Search Engine Queries.

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