This guide will take approximately 5 minutes to complete.
The purpose of this guide is to help you acquire a clear understanding of patient characteristics and drug interactions for an investigative drug safety profile, including a high-level overview of the frequency of an Adverse Event (AE) of interest.
Step 0: Log in
Refer to https://med.causaly.com
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A. Investigate the safety profile of a drug and refine for the concomitant medication of interest
Step 1: Explore AEs associated with a drug
To explore the AEs associated with a drug, select the Intelligent Search option in the Causaly home page (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Use the Intelligent Search on the Causaly home page
Begin your search by typing the name of a specific drug of interest in the input box, for example aspirin. To further refine for the safety profile of aspirin when taking a concomitant medication, such as ACE inhibitors, type the second treatment on the input box. Causaly will intelligently propose some search topics, where you can directly select the "Side effects of aspirin in combination with ACE inhibitors" option (Intelligent Search link) (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Select ‘Side effects of aspirin in combination with ACE inhibitors' from the list of search topics to view the results.
Results are displayed in an interactive dendrogram view (Figure 3). Upon clicking on a concept of interest, a side bar will appear displaying articles and evidence points supporting this relationship.
Figure 3: The dendrogram view when looking for side effects in a subpopulation of interest.
B. Explore drug-drug interactions
In order to investigate drug-drug interactions between two substances, use the Intelligent Search module and type the same keywords, as Case A. To investigate the drug-drug interactions, select the second option from the suggested search topics (Figure 4).
Example: Drug-drug interactions of aspirin and ACE-inhibitors (link)
Figure 4. Select the second suggestion to investigate potential interactions between two drugs of interest
When you perform a direct search, Causaly will look for direct associations not only between the drugs of interest, but also for the narrower concepts included in this search, as you can see in the ‘Grid’ tab (Figure 5).
Figure 5: The relationships between aspirin and ACE inhibitors, as well as the narrower concepts included below these two concepts (e.g. captopril, enalapril, lisinopril etc).
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- You can either navigate to the ‘Articles’ tab to explore all the supporting evidence, or select the ‘Grid’ tab to further investigate a specific relationship. In case of the latter, a side bar will be displayed where you can scan the relevant articles or further inspect the page (Figure 6).
Figure 6: The sidebar with the supporting evidence, when clicking on a relationship of interest in the ‘Grid’ view. - Click on the “Save” button to save your search and create alerts to receive notifications when new data regarding a relationship of interest become available (Figure 7).
Figure 7. Click on the “Save” button to save searches.
C. Find the incidence rate of a drug-induced indication
In order to find incidence and prevalence data, use the Epidemiology module and fill in the Concept box with the indication of interest.
Example: Incidence rate of hemorrhage due to ACE inhibitors (link) (Figure 8)
Figure 8: Look for epidemiology data of hemorrhage
To focus on a specific subpopulation, use the keyword box. In this example, type ACE to refine for patients taking ACE inhibitors (Figure 9).
Figure 9: Refine for the subpopulation of interest
Results will now include publications that report epidemiology data of hemorrhage in patients receiving ACE inhibitors.
TIP! You can use the filters on the left to refine this search further for countries, geographical areas, age group or a specific metric.