Exploring the drug-induced anemia signals in children using electronic medical records

Objectives: The objectives were to identify drugs related with anemia in children and evaluate the novelty of these correlations.

Methods: The authors established a two-step method for detecting the relationship between drugs and anemia using electronic medical records (EMRs), which were obtained from 247,136 patients in Beijing Children’s Hospital between 2007 and 2017. The authors extracted potential drugs by mining cases for hemoglobin abnormalities from the EMR and then performed a retrospective cohort study to correlate them with anemia by calculating the matched odds ratios and 95% confidence interval using unconditional logistic regression analysis.

Results: In total, nine positive drug-anemia associations were identified. Among them, the correlations of drugs fluconazole (OR 3.95; 95%CI: 2.65–5.87) and cefathiamidine (OR 3.49; 95%CI: 2.94–4.15) with anemia were considered new signals in both children and adults. Three associations of drugs, vancomycin, cefoperazone-sulbactam and ibuprofen, with anemia were considered new signals in children.

Conclusion: The authors detected nine signals of drug-induced anemia, including two new signals in children and adults and three new signals in children. This study could serve as a model for using EMR and automatic mining to monitor adverse drug reaction signals in the pediatric population.