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Many opinion-mining systems and tools have been developed to provide users with the attitudes of people toward entities and their attributes or the overall polarities of documents. In addition, side effects are one of the critical measures used to evaluate a patient’s opinion for a particular drug. However, side effect recognition is a challenging task, since side effects coincide with disease symptoms lexically and syntactically. The purpose of this paper is to extract drug side effects from drug reviews as an integral implicit-opinion words.

This paper proposes a detection algorithm to a medical-opinion-mining system using rule-based and support vector machines (SVM) algorithms. A corpus from 225 drug reviews was manually annotated by a medical expert for training and testing.

The results show that SVM significantly outperforms a rule-based algorithm. However, the results of both algorithms are encouraging and a good foundation for future research. Obviating the limitations and exploiting combined approaches would improve the results.

An automatic extraction for adverse drug effects information from online text can help regulatory authorities in rapid information screening and extraction instead of manual inspection and contributes to the acceleration of medical decision support and safety alert generation.

The results of this study can help database curators in compiling adverse drug effects databases and researchers to digest the huge amount of textual online information which is growing rapidly.

A Viagra-inspired drug, flibanserin, was marketed to treat women’s hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD). This paper aims to explore the value orientation of flibanserin as a treatment for female’s HSDD among different consumer segments.

Two surveys were run in the UK (Study 1, n = 223) and Israel (Study 2, n = 233), in which partnered heterosexual adults evaluated the value of the drug before and after being exposed to information on its side effects. Then, using content analysis of 36 online reviews among women who had tried the drug, the reported effectiveness and side effects were explored.

HSDD prevalence in both studies was about 50% (Study 1) and 66% (Study 2) (no gender differences in evaluations). All segments gave the drug less than neutral or negative value orientation ratings. Women did not relate low sexual desire to low levels of sexual thoughts that would increase flibanserin’s value orientation; however, men did. Information about flibanserin and its side effects decreased its value orientation for women, especially those with HSDD. The content analysis of user’s reviews showed most women reported side effects, said it was not effective and gave it a poor rating.

The results reveal the strategic problems in the marketing of the drug, both in its value orientation before and especially after exposure to information.

This research points to the necessity of evaluating the value orientation of flibanserin before marketing and satisfying the core expectations from the product (effectiveness and limited aversive side effects) among women with HSDD.

This study aimed to examine the mental health information entities and associations between the biomedical, psychological and social domains of bipolar disorder (BD) by analyzing social media data and scientific literature.

Reddit posts and full-text papers from PubMed Central (PMC) were collected. The text analysis was used to create a psychological dictionary. The text mining tools were applied to extract BD entities and their relationships in the datasets using a dictionary- and rule-based approach. Lastly, social network analysis and visualization were employed to view the associations.

Mental health information on the drug side effects entity was detected frequently in both datasets. In the affective category, the most frequent entities were “depressed” and “severe” in the social media and PMC data, respectively. The social and personal concerns entities that related to friends, family, self-attitude and economy were found repeatedly in the Reddit data. The relationships between the biomedical and psychological processes, “afraid” and “Lithium” and “schizophrenia” and “suicidal,” were identified often in the social media and PMC data, respectively.

Mental health information has been increasingly sought-after, and BD is a mental illness with complicated factors in the clinical picture. This paper has made an original contribution to comprehending the biological, psychological and social factors of BD. Importantly, these results have highlighted the benefit of mental health informatics that can be analyzed in the laboratory and social media domains.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework to detect adverse drug reactions (ADRs) using internet user search data, so that ADR events can be identified early. Empirical investigation of Avandia, a type II diabetes treatment, is conducted to illustrate how to implement the proposed framework.

Typical ADR identification measures and time series processing techniques are used in the proposed framework. Google Trends Data are employed to represent user searches. The baseline model is a disproportionality analysis using official drug reaction reporting data from the US Food and Drug Administration’s Adverse Event Reporting System.

Results show that Google Trends series of Avandia side effects search reveal a significant early warning signal for the side effect emergence of Avandia. The proposed approach of using user search data to detect ADRs is proved to have a longer leading time than traditional drug reaction discovery methods. Three more drugs with known adverse reactions are investigated using the selected approach, and two are successfully identified.

Validation of Google Trends data’s representativeness of user search is yet to be explored. In future research, user search in other search engines and in healthcare web forums can be incorporated to obtain a more comprehensive ADR early warning mechanism.

Using internet data in drug safety management with a proper early warning mechanism may serve as an earlier signal than traditional drug adverse reaction. This has great potential in public health emergency management.

The research work proposes a novel framework of using user search data in ADR identification. User search is a voluntary drug adverse reaction exploration behavior. Furthermore, user search data series are more concise and accurate than text mining in forums. The proposed methods as well as the empirical results will shed some light on incorporating user search data as a new source in pharmacovigilance.

The purpose of the study was to examine the effects of prescription drug advertising health risk disclosure prominence and the mediating role of introspective message attention.

An experiment was conducted to test varying levels of health risk disclosure prominence in prescription drug advertising (high vs low).

The results showed that a more prominent health risk disclosure than a less prominent one enhanced introspective message attention, risk knowledge and risk perception of the drug’s side effects. In addition, the introspective attention mediated the health risk disclosure effects on risk knowledge and risk perception.

The artificial experimental setting should be considered. In addition, various therapeutic categories and health risk disclosure formats need to be examined.

To ensure fair balance in prescription drug advertising, message designers should present a sufficient level of health risk disclosure prominence.

To encourage consumers to make informed prescription drug decisions, health risk information provided through prescription drug advertising may be important. Health-marketing promotional messages should address fair balance by considering health risk disclosure prominence.

Although the FDA has issued its risk communication guidance draft for pharmaceutical manufacturers to ensure fair balance between benefit and risk information in pharmaceutical promotion, little empirical research has been conducted to test the health risk disclosure prominence effects on consumers’ health-related perception about the drug. This study fills the gap in the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the extent to which exposure to a television commercial for an antidepressant drug (Cymbalta^®) compared to another commercial (Weight Watchers^®) influenced participants' knowledge of the drug (including side effects and indications) and self‐reported likelihood of seeking an antidepressant medication.

A randomized‐group design with two conditions was used with a sample of an ethnically diverse group of college students (n=498). Scores assessing drug knowledge and self‐reported likelihood of drug seeking and scores from the Beck Depression Inventory‐II (BDI‐II) were analyzed.

The Cymbalta^® group had higher drug‐knowledge scores than did the control group. Differences in drug‐seeking scores across conditions were not significant; however, drug‐knowledge scores and drug‐seeking scores were negatively related. Across groups, BDI‐II scores were positively related to drug seeking.

These results suggest that direct‐to‐consumer (DTC) advertising may educate consumers regarding medications, at least in the short term. Self‐reported intention to seek an antidepressant medication was significantly higher in participants who met the BDI‐II threshold for major depressive disorder, regardless of experimental condition.

A decreased desire to seek antidepressants, possibly due to increased familiarity with drug side‐effects, suggests that advertising may be educating viewers about important concerns about medication and that may impact their desire to seek those drugs.

Direct‐to‐consumer advertising (DTCA) of pharmaceuticals remains controversial, yet few experimental studies have examined the effects of DTCA on drug knowledge and drug‐seeking behavior of potential consumers.

To enlighten the food consumers and drug users as to some of their incompatibilities.

Examples from the literature covering compositions of food‐drug, food‐drug interactions, and dietary habits were collected from former works.

Major side‐effects of some diet(food) on drugs include alteration in absorption by fatty, high protein and fiber diets. Drugs such as methateiate, pyrimethamine, isonicotinic acid and asprin alter the transportation of some nutrients. Nutrient supplementations was found to be beneficial.

Possible factors affecting the reactions need to be identified.

It helps food consumers and drug users to avoid using some of these materials and also to adopt nutrient supplementation as a better alternative where possible.

The knowledge helps food technologists, nutritionists, physicians and pharmacists to serve the public better.

The health movement that has been sweeping this country has given rise to increased consumer awareness of both prescription and nonprescription medications. One of several responses to this heightened interest has been a plethora of drug information publications aimed at the general public audience. Some of these publications became so popular they attained positions on the best‐seller list. At the same time books, such as the PDR, that had generally been available only to health professionals began to find their way into popular bookstores.

Nutrition, as a science, is poorly understood, both professionally and publicly. The confusion that surrounds this science makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to formulate public health policy, which creates opportunities for political manipulation and control. Nutrition, for a century or more, has been variously described as a summation of the physiological and biochemical properties of individual nutrients in food rather than the whole food itself. This infers that isolated nutrients in supplements will function in the same way as nutrients in food. It also infers that removing or minimizing “undesirable” nutrients from food will make the food more healthful. This arises from the highly reductionist way that we focus on individual nutrients minus their natural context, both the context within the foods of which they are a part and the context within biological systems where they function. The shortcomings of this belief system may be illustrated by hugely costly mistakes made in the past, even more than a century ago, that corrupt current practices. Such mistakes have become so embedded in the contemporary narrative on nutritional science, both fundamentally and practically, that we fail to recognize the damage they continue to cause.

Alternatively, when nutritional effects are considered more within their natural contexts, that is, more wholistically, then it helps to explain, for example, the remarkable ability of nutrition, as provided by a whole food plant-based diet, to prevent even to cure varied types of cardiovascular disease. Furthermore, the breadth of this nutritional effect for a wide variety of illnesses and diseases suggests that nutrition, properly provided by a whole food plant-based diet, is more efficacious than a combination of all the contemporary pills and procedures combined. It also suggests that genetic determinism is not the explanation for disease that is widely advanced. And finally, among still more consequences, there are many societal outcomes that can be substantially mitigated, including the escalating cost of health care and the dangerously increasing array of destructive practices that damage the environment. Many of the momentous health, economic, environmental and sociopolitical problems currently faced may be traced to a misunderstanding of the effects of food and nutrition. The task therefore is how to bring this message to the attention of a public who for too long have gradually adopted flawed food production and healthcare systems that are on the verge of collapse, threatening the collapse of entire societies as we know them. More specifically, a public and professional dialog on the meaning of nutrition, especially its wholistic properties, is desperately needed, especially in medical schools where nutrition as a science is almost totally ignored.

This study investigates the prescription of antimuscarinic medication and the opinions of qualified psychiatric nursing staff regarding the use of ‘as required’ antimuscarinic drugs at a large secure psychiatric unit. No instances of inappropriate prescribing of antimuscarinic agents were found.