Overlap in drug-disease associations between clinical practice guidelines and drug structured product label indications

Psychotropic drugs prescription in undocumented migrants and indigent natives in Italy

To evaluate psychotropic drug use in undocumented migrants and natives in the same conditions of poverty. We studied drug dispensation by a nongovernmental organization during the year 2014. Drugs were identified according to the Anatomical Chemical Therapeutic classification and their quantity was measured in defined daily doses (DDD). We determined the percentage of patients taking at least one medicine with psychotropic activity in relation to the total number of patients receiving medicines of any class. We also calculated the individual DDD for psychoactive drugs. The percentage of natives receiving this type of medicine is significantly higher than that of undocumented migrants. Individual DDDs for each class of psychotropic drug are comparable in Italians and undocumented migrants and, among the latter, no difference was found in relation to ethnicity. Our findings describe for the first time the use of psychotropic medicines by undocumented migrants. On this basis, we hypothesize that poverty is more important than migration and ethnicity in generating the need for this type of pharmacological treatment. Both natives and undocumented migrants show poor adherence to treatment. This situation should be considered when programming health interventions in this field for the very poor and undocumented migrants.

High-Risk Drug-Drug Interactions Between Clinical Practice Guidelines for Management of Chronic Conditions

Clinicians and clinical decision-support systems often follow pharmacotherapy recommendations for patients based on clinical practice guidelines (CPGs). In multimorbid patients, these recommendations can potentially have clinically significant drug-drug interactions (DDIs). In this study, we describe and validate a method for programmatically detecting DDIs among CPG recommendations. The system extracts pharmacotherapy intervention recommendations from narrative CPGs, normalizes the terms, creates a mapping of drugs and drug classes, and then identifies occurrences of DDIs between CPG pairs. We used this system to analyze 75 CPGs written by authoring entities in the United States that discuss outpatient management of common chronic diseases. Using a reference list of high-risk DDIs, we identified 2198 of these DDIs in 638 CPG pairs (46 unique CPGs). Only 9 high-risk DDIs were discussed by both CPGs in a pairing. In 69 of the pairings, neither CPG had a pharmacologic reference or a warning of the possibility of a DDI.

Thematic issue of the Second combined Bio-ontologies and Phenotypes Workshop

This special issue covers selected papers from the 18th Bio-Ontologies Special Interest Group meeting and Phenotype Day, which took place at the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) conference in Dublin in 2015. The papers presented in this collection range from descriptions of software tools supporting ontology development and annotation of objects with ontology terms, to applications of text mining for structured relation extraction involving diseases and phenotypes, to detailed proposals for new ontologies and mapping of existing ontologies. Together, the papers consider a range of representational issues in bio-ontology development, and demonstrate the applicability of bio-ontologies to support biological and clinical knowledge-based decision making and analysis.

The full set of papers in the Thematic Issue is available at http://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/sig.