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Background and aimsProton pump inhibitors (PPIs) have been associated with adverse clinical outcomes amongst clopidogrel users after an acute coronary syndrome. Recent pre-clinical results suggest that this risk might extend to subjects without any prior history of cardiovascular disease. We explore this potential risk in the general population via data-mining approaches.MethodsUsing a novel approach for mining clinical data for pharmacovigilance, we queried over 16 million clinical documents on 2.9 million individuals to examine whether PPI usage was associated with cardiovascular risk in the general population.ResultsIn multiple data sources, we found gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) patients exposed to PPIs to have a 1.16 fold increased association (95% CI 1.09-1.24) with myocardial infarction (MI). Survival analysis in a prospective cohort found a two-fold (HR = 2.00; 95% CI 1.07-3.78; P = 0.031) increase in association with cardiovascular mortality. We found that this association exists regardless of clopidogrel use. We also found that H2 blockers, an alternate treatment for GERD, were not associated with increased cardiovascular risk; had they been in place, such pharmacovigilance algorithms could have flagged this risk as early as the year 2000.ConclusionsConsistent with our pre-clinical findings that PPIs may adversely impact vascular function, our data-mining study supports the association of PPI exposure with risk for MI in the general population. These data provide an example of how a combination of experimental studies and data-mining approaches can be applied to prioritize drug safety signals for further investigation.

ObjectiveDepression is a prevalent disorder difficult to diagnose and treat. In particular, depressed patients exhibit largely unpredictable responses to treatment. Toward the goal of personalizing treatment for depression, we develop and evaluate computational models that use electronic health record (EHR) data for predicting the diagnosis and severity of depression, and response to treatment.Materials and methodsWe develop regression-based models for predicting depression, its severity, and response to treatment from EHR data, using structured diagnosis and medication codes as well as free-text clinical reports. We used two datasets: 35,000 patients (5000 depressed) from the Palo Alto Medical Foundation and 5651 patients treated for depression from the Group Health Research Institute.ResultsOur models are able to predict a future diagnosis of depression up to 12 months in advance (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) 0.70-0.80). We can differentiate patients with severe baseline depression from those with minimal or mild baseline depression (AUC 0.72). Baseline depression severity was the strongest predictor of treatment response for medication and psychotherapy.ConclusionsIt is possible to use EHR data to predict a diagnosis of depression up to 12 months in advance and to differentiate between extreme baseline levels of depression. The models use commonly available data on diagnosis, medication, and clinical progress notes, making them easily portable. The ability to automatically determine severity can facilitate assembly of large patient cohorts with similar severity from multiple sites, which may enable elucidation of the moderators of treatment response in the future.