ResourceBlog Article: Wolfram|Alpha Adds New Content: Medical Drug Treatments

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Saturday, 17th July 2010

Wolfram|Alpha Adds New Content: Medical Drug Treatments

The new datasets just keep coming.

From a Blog Post:

A new medical diagnosis or drug treatment can often leave us with more questions than answers. A few weeks ago we introduced a disease dataset within Wolfram|Alpha that can be helpful for those wondering how their condition and treatment plans compare to those of other patients. Most notably, this dataset includes the fraction of patients within the United States that have been diagnosed with a medical condition in a given year. For each condition, Wolfram|Alpha has various levels of information, including commonly reported symptoms, co-occurring diseases, and lab tests used for diagnosis. Beyond this, Wolfram|Alpha also has carefully curated data on drug treatments.

For example:

+ drugs used to treat anemia
+ drug treatments diabetes
+ pharmaceuticals used to treat the flu

The data displayed from these inputs gives classes of drugs prescribed or administered to patients during health care provider visits. Wolfram|Alpha ranks the drug classes by the number of patients to whom they were administered.

[Snip]

Wolfram|Alpha can also can also provide generic options for prescription drug treatments. For example, by searching “drug treatments for depression” and pressing “Show drugs” and then selecting “Generic drugs” from the available options, we can see that though Lexapro, Zoloft, and Celexa are the top three most prescribed brand-name selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) drugs, switching to the generic drug view indicates that escitalopram, sertaline, and fluoxetine are the top-ranked generic drugs. This is interesting because if we switch back to the brand-name list, escitalopram (generic for Lexapro) and sertraline (generic for Zoloft) remain at the top two positions, but citalopram (generic for Celexa) drops off the top three and is replaced by fluoxetine (generic for Prozac). Further, by pressing the “More drugs” option at the top and switching between the generic and brand-name views, we can see that the percentage of females prescribed citalopram is 6.9% versus 4.7% for Celexa. This indicates that, although they are the same basic drug, another more obscure brand name version of citalopram is prescribed far less than Celexa.

Here are a few more examples:

+ Strep Throat

+ Smoking in Lung Cancer Patients (co-occurrence) or

+ Average Age of Tonsillitis Patients

+ Average Height of 40 Year Old Male

+ Tinnitus

Many more examples and screenshots in the remainder of the Wolfram|Alpha blog post.

Source: Wolfram|Alpha Blog

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