The study of statistics of search queries allows to detect previously unknown side effects of drugs

Using data from search engines Google, Bing and Yahoo in 2010, a group of researchers from Microsoft Research, Stanford and Columbia University confirmed the ability to detect side effects of drugs by analyzing the information from the logs of search engines for General purpose. To check the information about the fact that the combined use of two drugs — paroxetine and pravastatin may lead to hyperglycemia. This became known only in 2011, that is, in 2010 no information about this network could not be.

The researchers analyzed the frequency of the search terms associated with symptoms of hyperglycemia among users who previously searched for online information about these two drugs. It turned out that the frequency of search queries about the symptoms of hyperglycemia is much higher in those who were looking for information on both drugs than those who searched for just one of them. The diagrams show that the difference was tangible throughout the years and is not some temporary or seasonal effect.



Usually such side effects find out by analyzing medical records of patients in hospitals. The analysis of search queries allows you to find this much earlier, since people are not always immediately turn to a specialist as soon as discover a new symptom — a visit to the doctor requires time, money and can cause unpleasant emotions, while searching the Internet, it takes five minutes. Thus, in logs of search engines often contain much more complete and timely information than in the medical databases, it is necessary only to be able to find her.

PDF results of the study.

Article based on information from habrahabr.ru

Комментарии

Отправить комментарий

Популярные сообщения из этого блога

Automatically create Liquibase migrations for PostgreSQL

Изображение
Working with Liquibase always brings confidence in the fact that the database objects are in the same condition in which you want it. It is this confidence and makes system migrations so popular databases. Today I want to tell you how to make using liquibase a bit easier. If you write a migration by hand, and your target database is PostgreSQL, then read this article, I am sure, the time spent on reading the article will be repaid with interest. I hope you already know how to work with Liquibase, so only two words describe how the system works. In order to make changes in the database, you need to create a migration file (changeset) that you need to specify in the file change log (changelog), after which the migration can be successfully applied to the target database. Undeniable and obvious benefit of this approach is the ability to rollback the changes. In my opinion, liquibase, there is only one drawback — the automatic rollback of changes only works only if the mi
Далее...

Vkontakte sync with address book for iPhone. How it was done

Изображение
the Background application on androidphone when you install the application Vkontakte is possible to use it as a provider of contacts to synchronize the contacts from Facebook with contacts in your address book. In this case stretches the avatar, date of birth, address, phone numbers, etc. When I after prolonged use HTC Wildfire S rated and are so used to this that he wanted to find a similar to the iPhone. Not found, so we took it and made his own — Synchronizer VKontakte :) It was back in November of last year. The application was done fairly quickly — it uses quite a few functions of Vkontakte API and functionality with the address book of the iPhone. But when we started to deal with the automatic matching of contacts, it was fun. Compare head-on by name, last name and phone number was easy to do, easy, and worked through it quickly. But found only 20 percent of coincidences of the contacts from what is provider in Android. Of course, only direct hits do not sui
Далее...

What part of the archived web

Изображение
/ > the time Machine Internet Archive is the largest and well-known archive that preserves web pages since 1995. Besides him there are a dozen other services, which are also archived to the web: the indexes of search engines and industry-specific archives like Archive-It , UK Web Archive , Cite Web , ArchiefWeb , Diigo . Interesting to know how many web pages gets into these files, relative to the total number of documents in the Internet? It is known that the base of the Internet Archive for 2011 contains more than 2.7 billion URIs , many of them in multiple copies taken at different points in time. For example, the home page of Habra "photographed" already 518 times since July 3, 2006 . It is also known that the base reference Google five years ago overstepped the mark in trillion unique URLS , although many of the documents were duplicated. Google is not able to perform all URLS, so the company decided to count the number of documents in the Internet a
Далее...