Study of Online Health Discussion Fora for the Detection of Medication Misuses

Misuses occur when patients do not respect prescriptions and commit actions which can lead to harmful results. Even if such situations are dangerous, patients do not inform medical doctors about such events. To obtain some information on misuses, it becomes necessary to study other sources of information. We propose to concentrate on discussion fora. The purpose of our work is to explore health fora with machine learning methods and to identify messages where users describe or mention drug misuses. Our approach detects the mesuses with up to 0.773 F-measure. This approach can help in routine detection of misuses and to provide material exploitable by health professionals.