Mining Heterogeneous Healthcare Networks Extracted from Health-Consumer-Contributed Contents for Adverse Drug Reaction Detection

Drug safety, also known as pharmacovigilance, is defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as “the science and activities relating to the detection, assessment, understanding and prevention of adverse effects or any other possible drug-related problems” (WHO 2002). How to detect signal of adverse drug reactions (ADRs) has become one important issue of drug safety. In 2000, ADR was defined comprehensively by Edwards and Aronson (Edwards and Aronson 2000) as: “an appreciably harmful or unpleasant reaction, resulting from an intervention related to the use of a medicinal product, which predicts hazard from future administration and warrants prevention or specific treatment, or alteration of the dosage regimen, or withdrawal of the product”. In the United States, it is estimated that approximately 2 million patients are affected each year by ADRs (Liu and Chen 2013) and associated cost is up to about 75 billion dollars annually (Sarker et al. 2015). Therefore, how to effectively and efficiently detect ADR signals is of paramount importance for drug manufacturers, government agencies, as well as health consumers.