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Severe mental illnesses (SMI) including major depressive disorder (MDD), bipolar disorder (BD), and schizophrenia spectrum disorder (SSD) elevate accelerated brain aging risks. Cardio-metabolic disorders (CMD) are common comorbidities in SMI and negatively impact brain health. We validated a linear quantile regression index (QRI) approach against the machine learning "BrainAge" index in an independent SSD cohort (N = 206). We tested the direct and additive effects of SMI and CMD effects on accelerated brain aging in the N = 1,618 (604 M/1,014 F, average age = 63.53 ± 7.38) subjects with SMI and N = 11,849 (5,719 M/6,130 F; 64.42 ± 7.38) controls from the UK Biobank. Subjects were subdivided based on diagnostic status: SMI+/CMD+ (N = 665), SMI+/CMD- (N = 964), SMI-/CMD+ (N = 3,765), SMI-/CMD- (N = 8,083). SMI (F = 40.47, p = 2.06 × 10

Objective Data-mining algorithms that can produce accurate signals of potentially novel adverse drug reactions (ADRs) are a central component of pharmacovigilance. We propose a signal-detection strategy that combines the adverse event reporting system (AERS) of the Food and Drug Administration and electronic health records (EHRs) by requiring signaling in both sources. We claim that this approach leads to improved accuracy of signal detection when the goal is to produce a highly selective ranked set of candidate ADRs. Materials and methods Our investigation was based on over 4 million AERS reports and information extracted from 1.2 million EHR narratives. Well-established methodologies were used to generate signals from each source. The study focused on ADRs related to three high-profile serious adverse reactions. A reference standard of over 600 established and plausible ADRs was created and used to evaluate the proposed approach against a comparator. Results The combined signaling system achieved a statistically significant large improvement over AERS (baseline) in the precision of top ranked signals. The average improvement ranged from 31% to almost threefold for different evaluation categories. Using this system, we identified a new association between the agent, rasburicase, and the adverse event, acute pancreatitis, which was supported by clinical review. Conclusions The results provide promising initial evidence that combining AERS with EHRs via the framework of replicated signaling can improve the accuracy of signal detection for certain operating scenarios. The use of additional EHR data is required to further evaluate the capacity and limits of this system and to extend the generalizability of these results.

Electronic health records (EHRs) are an important source of data for detection of adverse drug reactions (ADRs). However, adverse events are frequently due not to medications but to the patients' underlying conditions. Mining to detect ADRs from EHR data must account for confounders. We developed an automated method using natural-language processing (NLP) and a knowledge source to differentiate cases in which the patient's disease is responsible for the event rather than a drug. Our method was applied to 199,920 hospitalization records, concentrating on two serious ADRs: rhabdomyolysis (n = 687) and agranulocytosis (n = 772). Our method automatically identified 75% of the cases, those with disease etiology. The sensitivity and specificity were 93.8% (confidence interval: 88.9-96.7%) and 91.8% (confidence interval: 84.0-96.2%), respectively. The method resulted in considerable saving of time: for every 1 h spent in development, there was a saving of at least 20 h in manual review. The review of the remaining 25% of the cases therefore became more feasible, allowing us to identify the medications that had caused the ADRs.

Adverse drug events (ADEs) create a serious problem causing substantial harm to patients. An executable standardized knowledgebase of drug-ADE relations which is publicly available would be valuable so that it could be used for ADE detection. The literature is an important source that could be used to generate a knowledgebase of drug-ADE pairs. In this paper, we report on a method that automatically determines whether a specific adverse event (AE) is caused by a specific drug based on the content of PubMed citations. A drug-ADE classification method was initially developed to detect neutropenia based on a pre-selected set of drugs. This method was then applied to a different set of 76 drugs to determine if they caused neutropenia. For further proof of concept this method was applied to 48 drugs to determine whether they caused another AE, myocardial infarction. Results showed that AUROC was 0.93 and 0.86 respectively.

The identification of post-marketed adverse drug events (ADEs) is paramount to health care. Spontaneous reporting systems (SRS) are currently the mainstay in pharmacovigilance. Recently, electronic health records (EHRs) have emerged as a promising and effective complementary resource to SRS, as they contain a more complete record of the patient, and do not suffer from the reporting biases inherent to SRS. However, mining EHRs for potential ADEs, which typically involves identification of statistical associations between drugs and medical conditions, introduced several other challenges, the main one being the necessity for statistical techniques that account for confounding. The objective of this paper is to present and demonstrate the feasibility of a method based on regression techniques, which is designed for automated large scale mining of ADEs in EHR narratives. To the best of our knowledge this is a first of its kind approach that combines both the use of EHR data, and regression based methods in order to address confounding and identify potential ADEs. Two separate experiments are conducted. The results, which are validated by clinical subject matter experts, demonstrate great promise, as well as highlight additional challenges.

Data errors in electronic health records have been shown to have the potential to adversely impact the conclusions drawn from clinical research. We prospectively studied the efficacy of a new alert to infer errors in previously stored data and to decrease the frequency of data entry errors, in an attempt to improve the quality of data for clinical trials. For the purpose of this study, we monitored data entry errors in height or weight measurements. We predetermined the criteria for probable error as a ten percent variance from a patient’s reference value. The care provider entering a value satisfying our error criteria received a disruptive pop-up alert message. The study revealed a significant decrease in the frequency of data errors stored in the EHR, from 2.4% before the alert to 0.9% after the alert. These findings have implications for the development of clinical research trial data collection support tools.