Drug Safety in the Digital Age  

Oleh:

Hwang, Thomas J. ; Bourgeois, Florence T. ; Seeger, John D.

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: The New England Journal of Medicine (keterangan: ada di Proquest) vol. 370 no. 26 (Jun. 2014), page 2460-2462.

Ketersediaan

Perpustakaan FK Nomor Panggil: N08.K.2014.01 Non-tandon: 1 (dapat dipinjam: 0) Tandon: tidak ada

Lihat Detail Induk

Isi artikel

The Internet is increasingly redefining the ways in which people interact with information related to their health. The Pew Internet Project estimates that more than half of all Americans sought health information online in 2013, mostly through search engines such as Google and websites such as Wikipedia and WebMD. In this digital age, engaging with new media offers an unparalleled opportunity for medical and public health professionals to find information they need and to interactively reach out to patients and their support networks. One domain where these capabilities may have far-reaching effects that are currently undefined is drug safety. As the volume of health-related information on the Internet has grown, important questions have emerged. How are messages from regulators — for example, warnings against using a drug in a specific patient population — diffused digitally? And are the messages still accurate when they reach the general population? To explore these questions, we selected new drug-safety communications related to prescription medicines that were issued by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over a 2-year period between January 1, 2011, and December 31, 2012 (see Table S1 in the Supplementary Appendix, available with the full text of this article at NEJM.org). Despite debates over its credibility, Wikipedia is reportedly the most frequently consulted online health care resource globally1: Wikipedia pages typically appear among the top few Google search results and are among the references most likely to be checked by Internet users.2 We therefore evaluated Google searches and Wikipedia page views for each drug in our sample. We also examined the content of Wikipedia pages, looking specifically for references to safety warnings. To control for secular trends, we examined results from a 120-day window around the date of the announcement (from 60 days before the announcement to 60 days after it) and constructed a baseline period for comparison that ran from 60 days to 10 days before the period of interest began.3

Opini Anda

Klik untuk menuliskan opini Anda tentang koleksi ini!

Kembali