Internet searches reveal drug interactions?

The New York Times has a story about finding interactions between common medications using internet search histories.  The research, published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, looks at search histories containing searches for two medication names and also for possible symptoms.  For example, their primary success was finding that people who searched for information on paroxetine (an antidepressant) and pravastatin (a cholesterol-lowering drug) were more likely to search for information on a set of symptoms that can be caused by high blood sugar.  These two drugs are now known to interact to cause high blood sugar in some people, although this wasn’t known at the time the internet searches took place.

This approach is promising, but like so many approaches to safety of medications it is limited by the huge number of possibilities.  The researchers knew where to look: they knew which drugs to examine and which symptoms to follow. With the thousands of different medications, leading to millions of possible interacting pairs and dozens or hundreds of sets of symptoms it becomes much harder to know what’s going on.

Drug safety is hard.