Pharmacoepidemiologic Evaluation of Birth Defects from Health-Related Postings in Social Media During Pregnancy

Susan Golder (), Stephanie Chiuve, Davy Weissenbacher, Ari Klein, Karen O’Connor, Martin Bland, Murray Malin, Mondira Bhattacharya, Linda J. Scarazzini and Graciela Gonzalez-Hernandez
Additional contact information
Stephanie Chiuve: AbbVie
Davy Weissenbacher: University of Pennsylvania
Ari Klein: University of Pennsylvania
Karen O’Connor: University of Pennsylvania
Martin Bland: University of York
Murray Malin: AbbVie
Mondira Bhattacharya: AbbVie
Linda J. Scarazzini: AbbVie
Graciela Gonzalez-Hernandez: University of Pennsylvania

Drug Safety, 2019, vol. 42, issue 3, No 5, 389-400

Abstract: Abstract Introduction Adverse effects of medications taken during pregnancy are traditionally studied through post-marketing pregnancy registries, which have limitations. Social media data may be an alternative data source for pregnancy surveillance studies. Objective The objective of this study was to assess the feasibility of using social media data as an alternative source for pregnancy surveillance for regulatory decision making. Methods We created an automated method to identify Twitter accounts of pregnant women. We identified 196 pregnant women with a mention of a birth defect in relation to their baby and 196 without a mention of a birth defect in relation to their baby. We extracted information on pregnancy and maternal demographics, medication intake and timing, and birth defects. Results Although often incomplete, we extracted data for the majority of the pregnancies. Among women that reported birth defects, 35% reported taking one or more medications during pregnancy compared with 17% of controls. After accounting for age, race, and place of residence, a higher medication intake was observed in women who reported birth defects. The rate of birth defects in the pregnancy cohort was lower (0.44%) compared with the rate in the general population (3%). Conclusions Twitter data capture information on medication intake and birth defects; however, the information obtained cannot replace pregnancy registries at this time. Development of improved methods to automatically extract and annotate social media data may increase their value to support regulatory decision making regarding pregnancy outcomes in women using medications during their pregnancies.

Date: 2019
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s40264-018-0731-6 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:drugsa:v:42:y:2019:i:3:d:10.1007_s40264-018-0731-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/adis/journal/40264

DOI: 10.1007/s40264-018-0731-6

Access Statistics for this article

Drug Safety is currently edited by Nitin Joshi

More articles in Drug Safety from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().