Dive Brief:
- According to a report in MobiHealthNews, a group of researchers have found that, for 23 commonly-used drugs, well more than three times as many adverse drug reactions were reported on Twitter in a given time period than were reported to the FDA.
- To examine this phenomenon, researchers collected 6.9 million tweets, then randomly chose 61,000 of those tweets to analyze.
- Of those 61,000 tweets, 4,400 were identified as adverse drug events. During the same time, just 1,400 events related to those 23 drugs were reported to the FDA through normal channels.
Dive Insight:
While this data is intriguing, it's not conclusive. After all, it's not absolutely clear when a tweeted report is actually an adverse event report, researchers note, as they are seldom as specific or useful as FDA reports. In other words, the difference between the FDA reports and the more casual reports on Twitter greatly undermines the tweets' usefulness, as many tweets are too informal and irregular to be evaluated by computer analysis.