Network of Mediciation Side Effects
I recently stumbled upon a database[1] of prescription and generic medicine that contains all of the side effects listed on thier labels. As we all know from all of those prescription medication commercials (looking at you cialis) the side effects take up about half the commercial. I wondered if certain side effects always showed up together. Kinda how cough and cold are always packaged together. I downloaded and scrubbed the database. From there I broke it up into two groups, the map above and the map below.The network above has all of the most LIKELY side effects from the medication. This was defined as occurring more than 60% of the time in people who took the medication. This narrowed the 200+ side effects to under 100. I with my very rudimentary medical training grouped these effects into certain categories (bones, blood based, mental, etc). The stroke width of the bonds between two side effects are determined by how many times they both show up together on a side effects list. I created the force graph in d3 with help from two great sources [2][3]. You can manipulate this web and if you double click a point it highlights its neighbors that it is usually paired with.The network below is the top 50 most COMMON side effects. These side effects appeared most on the labels of all the prescription meds. Because these side effects were so frequent they were connected to everything and produced a rather boring glob of points (as you can see below now). I further restricted the bonds by only keeping links that appeared over 200 times. This produced a (slightly) less intricate web. You can move the slider to break and form bonds, weaker bonds break first. This network also allows for double clicking.Pretty cool stuff. This might be useful for prediction as certain side effects are always linked together. Future steps might be a more rigorous grouping rather than my less-than informed medical opinion.All the visualization credit goes to the bottom two sources. All the above is based of the work of the two below. They helped me immensely as I am a novice in javascript. Also a quick shoutout to the [4] source as it was a complete pain to get d3 working with wordpress.-Marcello[1]http://sideeffects.embl.de/[2]https://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/4062045[3] http://www.coppelia.io/2014/07/an-a-to-z-of-extra-features-for-the-d3-force-layout/[4]https://www.datamaplab.com/posts/embedding-javascript-visualization-wordpress/