A risk identification model for detection of patients at risk of antidepressant discontinuation.

Purpose: Between 30 and 68% of patients prematurely discontinue their antidepressant treatment, posing significant risks to patient safety and healthcare outcomes. Online healthcare forums have the potential to offer a rich and unique source of data, revealing dimensions of antidepressant discontinuation that may not be captured by conventional data sources. Methods: We analyzed 891 patient narratives from the online healthcare forum, "askapatient.com," utilizing content analysis to create PsyRisk-a corpus highlighting the risk factors associated with antidepressant discontinuation. Leveraging PsyRisk, alongside PsyTAR [a publicly available corpus of adverse drug reactions (ADRs) related to antidepressants], we developed a machine learning-driven algorithm for proactive identification of patients at risk of abrupt antidepressant discontinuation. Results: From the analyzed 891 patients, 232 reported antidepressant discontinuation. Among these patients, 92% experienced ADRs, and 72% found these reactions distressful, negatively affecting their daily activities. Approximately 26% of patients perceived the antidepressants as ineffective. Most reported ADRs were physiological (61%, 411/673), followed by cognitive (30%, 197/673), and psychological (28%, 188/673) ADRs. In our study, we employed a nested cross-validation strategy with an outer 5-fold cross-validation for model selection, and an inner 5-fold cross-validation for hyperparameter tuning. The performance of our risk identification algorithm, as assessed through this robust validation technique, yielded an AUC-ROC of 90.77 and an F1-score of 83.33. The most significant contributors to abrupt discontinuation were high perceived distress from ADRs and perceived ineffectiveness of the antidepressants. Conclusion: The risk factors identified and the risk identification algorithm developed in this study have substantial potential for clinical application. They could assist healthcare professionals in identifying and managing patients with depression who are at risk of prematurely discontinuing their antidepressant treatment.

Identifying the underlying factors associated with antidepressant drug discontinuation: content analysis of patients' drug reviews.

The rate of antidepressant prescriptions is globally increasing. A large portion of patients stop their medications, which could lead to many side effects including relapse, and anxiety. The aim of this was to develop a drug-continuity prediction model and identify the factors associated with drug-continuity using online patient forums. We retrieved 982 antidepressant drug reviews from the online patient's forum AskaPatient.com. We followed the Analytical Framework Method to extract structured data from unstructured data. Using the structured data, we examined the factors associated with antidepressant discontinuity and developed a predictive model using multiple machine learning techniques. We tested multiple machine learning techniques which resulted in different performances ranging from accuracy of 65% to 82%. We found that Random Forest algorithm provides the highest prediction method with 82% Accuracy, 78% Precision, 88.03% Recall, and 84.2% F1-Score. The factors associated with drug discontinuity the most were: withdrawal symptoms, effectiveness-ineffectiveness, perceived-distress-adverse drug reaction, rating, and perceiveddistress related to withdrawal symptoms. Although the nature of data available at online forums differ from data collected through surveys, we found that online patients forum can be a valuable source of data for drug continuity prediction and understanding patients experience. The factors identified through our techniques were consistent with the findings of prior studies that used surveys.