The additive impact of cardio-metabolic disorders and psychiatric illnesses on accelerated brain aging.

Severe mental illnesses (SMI) including major depressive disorder (MDD), bipolar disorder (BD), and schizophrenia spectrum disorder (SSD) elevate accelerated brain aging risks. Cardio-metabolic disorders (CMD) are common comorbidities in SMI and negatively impact brain health. We validated a linear quantile regression index (QRI) approach against the machine learning "BrainAge" index in an independent SSD cohort (N = 206). We tested the direct and additive effects of SMI and CMD effects on accelerated brain aging in the N = 1,618 (604 M/1,014 F, average age = 63.53 ± 7.38) subjects with SMI and N = 11,849 (5,719 M/6,130 F; 64.42 ± 7.38) controls from the UK Biobank. Subjects were subdivided based on diagnostic status: SMI+/CMD+ (N = 665), SMI+/CMD- (N = 964), SMI-/CMD+ (N = 3,765), SMI-/CMD- (N = 8,083). SMI (F = 40.47, p = 2.06 × 10-10 ) and CMD (F = 24.69, p = 6.82 × 10-7 ) significantly, independently impacted whole-brain QRI in SMI+. SSD had the largest effect (Cohen's d = 1.42) then BD (d = 0.55), and MDD (d = 0.15). Hypertension had a significant effect on SMI+ (d = 0.19) and SMI- (d = 0.14). SMI effects were direct, independent of MD, and remained significant after correcting for effects of antipsychotic medications. Whole-brain QRI was significantly (p < 10-16 ) associated with the volume of white matter hyperintensities (WMH). However, WMH did not show significant association with SMI and was driven by CMD, chiefly hypertension (p < 10-16 ). We used a simple and robust index, QRI, the demonstrate additive effect of SMI and CMD on accelerated brain aging. We showed a greater effect of psychiatric illnesses on QRI compared to cardio-metabolic illness. Our findings suggest that subjects with SMI should be among the targets for interventions to protect against age-related cognitive decline.

Evaluation considerations for EHR-based phenotyping algorithms: A case study for drug-induced liver injury.

Developing electronic health record (EHR) phenotyping algorithms involves generating queries that run across the EHR data repository. Algorithms are commonly assessed within demonstration studies. There remains, however, little emphasis on assessing the precision and accuracy of measurement methods during the evaluation process. Depending on the complexity of an algorithm, interim refinements may be required to improve measurement methods. Therefore, we develop an evaluation framework that incorporates both measurement and demonstration studies. We evaluate a baseline EHR phenotyping algorithm for drug induced liver injury (DILI) developed in collaboration with electronic Medical Records Genomics (eMERGE) network participants. We conduct a measurement study and report qualitative (i.e., perceptions of evaluation approach effectiveness) and quantitative (i.e., inter-rater reliability) measures. We also conduct a demonstration study and report qualitative (i.e., appropriateness of results) and quantitative (i.e., positive predictive value) measures. Given results from the measurement study, our evaluation approach underwent multiple changes including the addition of laboratory value visualization and an expanded review of clinical notes. Results from the demonstration study informed changes to our algorithm. For example, given the goal of eMERGE to identify patients who may have a genetic susceptibility to DILI, we excluded overdose patients.

Combing signals from spontaneous reports and electronic health records for detection of adverse drug reactions.

OBJECTIVE: Data-mining algorithms that can produce accurate signals of potentially novel adverse drug reactions (ADRs) are a central component of pharmacovigilance. We propose a signal-detection strategy that combines the adverse event reporting system (AERS) of the Food and Drug Administration and electronic health records (EHRs) by requiring signaling in both sources. We claim that this approach leads to improved accuracy of signal detection when the goal is to produce a highly selective ranked set of candidate ADRs. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Our investigation was based on over 4 million AERS reports and information extracted from 1.2 million EHR narratives. Well-established methodologies were used to generate signals from each source. The study focused on ADRs related to three high-profile serious adverse reactions. A reference standard of over 600 established and plausible ADRs was created and used to evaluate the proposed approach against a comparator. RESULTS: The combined signaling system achieved a statistically significant large improvement over AERS (baseline) in the precision of top ranked signals. The average improvement ranged from 31% to almost threefold for different evaluation categories. Using this system, we identified a new association between the agent, rasburicase, and the adverse event, acute pancreatitis, which was supported by clinical review. CONCLUSIONS: The results provide promising initial evidence that combining AERS with EHRs via the framework of replicated signaling can improve the accuracy of signal detection for certain operating scenarios. The use of additional EHR data is required to further evaluate the capacity and limits of this system and to extend the generalizability of these results.

A collaborative approach to developing an electronic health record phenotyping algorithm for drug-induced liver injury.

OBJECTIVE: To describe a collaborative approach for developing an electronic health record (EHR) phenotyping algorithm for drug-induced liver injury (DILI). METHODS: We analyzed types and causes of differences in DILI case definitions provided by two institutions-Columbia University and Mayo Clinic; harmonized two EHR phenotyping algorithms; and assessed the performance, measured by sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and negative predictive value, of the resulting algorithm at three institutions except that sensitivity was measured only at Columbia University. RESULTS: Although these sites had the same case definition, their phenotyping methods differed by selection of liver injury diagnoses, inclusion of drugs cited in DILI cases, laboratory tests assessed, laboratory thresholds for liver injury, exclusion criteria, and approaches to validating phenotypes. We reached consensus on a DILI phenotyping algorithm and implemented it at three institutions. The algorithm was adapted locally to account for differences in populations and data access. Implementations collectively yielded 117 algorithm-selected cases and 23 confirmed true positive cases. DISCUSSION: Phenotyping for rare conditions benefits significantly from pooling data across institutions. Despite the heterogeneity of EHRs and varied algorithm implementations, we demonstrated the portability of this algorithm across three institutions. The performance of this algorithm for identifying DILI was comparable with other computerized approaches to identify adverse drug events. CONCLUSIONS: Phenotyping algorithms developed for rare and complex conditions are likely to require adaptive implementation at multiple institutions. Better approaches are also needed to share algorithms. Early agreement on goals, data sources, and validation methods may improve the portability of the algorithms.

A drug-adverse event extraction algorithm to support pharmacovigilance knowledge mining from PubMed citations.

Adverse drug events (ADEs) create a serious problem causing substantial harm to patients. An executable standardized knowledgebase of drug-ADE relations which is publicly available would be valuable so that it could be used for ADE detection. The literature is an important source that could be used to generate a knowledgebase of drug-ADE pairs. In this paper, we report on a method that automatically determines whether a specific adverse event (AE) is caused by a specific drug based on the content of PubMed citations. A drug-ADE classification method was initially developed to detect neutropenia based on a pre-selected set of drugs. This method was then applied to a different set of 76 drugs to determine if they caused neutropenia. For further proof of concept this method was applied to 48 drugs to determine whether they caused another AE, myocardial infarction. Results showed that AUROC was 0.93 and 0.86 respectively.

Statistical Mining of Potential Drug Interaction Adverse Effects in FDA's Spontaneous Reporting System.

Many adverse drug effects (ADEs) can be attributed to drug interactions. Spontaneous reporting systems (SRS) provide a rich opportunity to detect novel post-marketed drug interaction adverse effects (DIAEs), as they include populations not well represented in clinical trials. However, their identification in SRS is nontrivial. Most existing research have addressed the statistical issues used to test or verify DIAEs, but not their identification as part of a systematic large scale database-wide mining process as discussed in this work. This paper examines the application of a highly optimized and tailored implementation of the Apriori algorithm, as well as methods addressing data quality issues, to the identification of DIAEs in FDAs SRS.

Use of clinical alerting to improve the collection of clinical research data.

Data errors in electronic health records have been shown to have the potential to adversely impact the conclusions drawn from clinical research. We prospectively studied the efficacy of a new alert to infer errors in previously stored data and to decrease the frequency of data entry errors, in an attempt to improve the quality of data for clinical trials. For the purpose of this study, we monitored data entry errors in height or weight measurements. We predetermined the criteria for probable error as a ten percent variance from a patient's reference value. The care provider entering a value satisfying our error criteria received a disruptive pop-up alert message. The study revealed a significant decrease in the frequency of data errors stored in the EHR, from 2.4% before the alert to 0.9% after the alert. These findings have implications for the development of clinical research trial data collection support tools.