Category Archives: Voice of the Patient

Post sobre la voz del paciente

Could Antidepressants Be the Cause of Birth Defects?

We agree that it is not typical at all for an Information Technology company to talk about antidepressants and pregnancy in its own blog. But here at MeaningCloud we have realized that health issues have a great impact on social networks, and the companies from that industry, including pharmas, should try to understand the conversation which arises around them. How? Through text analysis technology, as discussed below.

Looking at the data collected by our prototype for monitoring health issues in social media, we were surprised by the sudden increase in mentions of the term ‘pregnancy’ on July 10. In order to understand the reason of this fact, we analyzed the tweets related to pregnancy and childbearing. It turned out that the same day a piece of news on a study issued by the British Medical Journal about the harmful effects that antidepressants can have on the fetus had been published.
Continue reading