Computational search engine WolframAlpha has expanded its offerings to include detailed statistics on disease symptoms, treatments, pharmaceuticals and generic drugs.
You can now search for "drug treatments for diabetes" or "pharmaceuticals used to treat the flu" and find information on classes of drugs prescribed or administered to patients during health-care provider visits. Click on the "show drugs" button and you'll find a ranked table of brand-name pharmaceuticals prescribed within each class and additional details on drug-prescribing patterns between sexes. Select "generic drugs" from the pull down menu to access the same data for off-brand products.
The WolframAlpha Blog explains how search results for such queries are organized:
Wolfram|Alpha ranks the drug classes by the number of patients to whom they were administered. For example, “hypertension drug treatment”, initially shows us that, of all the patients diagnosed with hypertension, 25% were prescribed angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors, 22% HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors, 21% cardioselective beta blockers, 19% antihypertensive combinations, and 16% calcium channel blocking agents. (That’s over 100% total because some patients are prescribed more than one medication.)
WolframAlpha intends to continue adding prescription information to its drug treatment dataset.
Previously: Wolfram Alpha launches, talks medicine, WolframAlpha improves its medical capabilities, The WolframAlpha diet, WolframAlpha integrates World Health Organization data
Via Medgadget
