Drug Side-Effects: What Do Patient Forums Reveal?

Adverse drug reactions are a threat to health, sometimes to the extent of causing death, as well as imposing a substantial time and financial cost from patients and healthcare providers. The most common of these negative sideeffects are reported by their manufacturers; however, other side-effects may be discovered through different surveillance methods, including volunteer reporting by doctors and pharmacists, and recently, patient self-reports in online forums. Extraction of side-effect information from these forums is challenging but useful for finding indications of adverse reactions that may otherwise go unreported. We outline our vision for this problem, our approach to data collection, and the methodologies we intend to use for side-effect extraction from patient forums.