Table 1.

Key challenges in identifying adverse drug events from social media

1) Drugs may be described by their brand names, active ingredients, colloquialisms or generic drug terms (e.g. ‘antibiotic’)

2) ADRs may be referred to using creative idiomatic expressions or terms not found within existing medical lexicons

3) The informal nature of social media results in a prevalence of poor grammar, spelling mistakes, abbreviations and slang

4) The existence of a side effect may be clear while the specific side effect experienced remains unclear

5) Discussion of a drug could involve indications, beneficial effects or concerns of an adverse event

6) Supervised machine learning, while powerful, needs training data which requires time-consuming and expensive generation of human-annotated data

Only a small percentage of social media will relate to ADRs