This guide will take approximately 3 minutes to complete.
In this guide you will learn:
- How to search for side effects in Intelligent Search
- How to refine your search to a specific context by using keywords
Step 0: Login
Refer to https://med.causaly.com
TIP! In case you’ve forgotten your password, you can recover it here.
Step 1: Use Intelligent Search to look for side effects
To explore side effects of a specific drug or therapeutic use the Intelligent Search on the Causaly home page (Figure 1).
Figure 1. The Intelligent Search on the Causaly homepage
Begin your search by typing the name or abbreviation of a drug or therapeutic in the input box and select the concept of interest. The system will then propose a list of relevant search topics for the chosen concept. Select the side effects option to look for the adverse reactions triggered by the drug of interest, such as levetiracetam (Intelligent Search link) (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Select “Side effects of levetiracetam” from the suggested search topics
Results will be displayed in an interactive dendrogram view. Before exploring the dendrogram, examine the preselected filters on the left of your screen that Causaly has included by default to display as side effects.
TIP!
- By default, the system will include the upregulate arrow under the “Relationship Type” filter to look for everything induced by the drug. To find out what the different arrows mean in Causaly, visit this guide.
- The Disorders category under the UMLS filter and the MedDRA classification system are preselected to refine the results to disorders. You can change the filters, based on what you consider as a side effect.
- To limit your results to the adverse effects associated with a specific organ system, for example the nervous system , select the category ‘Nervous system disorders’ under the MedDRA classification system in the filter panel on the left (Intelligent Search link) (Figure 3).
Figure 3: Refine results to “nervous system disorders” under the MedDRA classification system.
The results will now display the nervous system disorders that are induced by the drug of interest.
Step 2: Refine your search to a specific context by using keywords
To further refine the results to a specific disorder, type the relevant keyword(s) on the input box (Figure 4). The system will adjust the suggested search topics and you can directly select the one that you would like to explore further.
If we were looking for side effects of levetiracetam in patients with epilepsy, for instance, you can then select the option “effects of levetiracetam in epilepsy”.
Figure 4: Explore side effects of levetiracetam in patients with epilepsy
To explore how Causaly constructed your search for side effects of levetiracetam in patients with epilepsy, you can open this search in Advanced search (Figure 5).
Figure 5: Select “Open in advanced search” to refine your query.
In the Advanced search, the keyword “epilepsy” exists within the text box to define the subpopulation (Figure 6) (Advanced Search link)
Figure 6: Explore the side effects for levetiracetam in patients with epilepsy by using keywords in Advanced Search
TIP! By using keyword search, you can limit your results to specific age groups (e.g. adolescents OR pediatric etc), patient status (e.g. pregnancy OR lactation), animal studies (e.g. mouse OR rat OR rabbit etc) and more. For more information on how to use the free text box, click here.
You can further refine this search by using additional filters on the left of your screen. Filters include the publication type, year of publication, article section, data source, journal, and journal rank (SJR). To explore how you can best use the different filters, click here.
Want to learn more about how to find evidence in Causaly?
Find more information and examples on how to search posts by clicking here.