New Algorithms Identify Side Effects of Prescription Drugs

We're all used to hearing disclaimers about prescription drug side effects. They drone on in television commercials and take up pages of tiny print accompanying the prescriptions themselves. But with an estimated 10,000 prescription drugs available in the U.S. market alone, surprisingly little research has been done about the adverse effects each drug can cause. Enter professor David Madigan , chair of Columbia's statistics department. He was recently tapped by the Food and Drug Administration and the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health to create algorithms that can help medical experts determine which drugs cause which side effects. Madigan is midway through a two-year project to test those algorithms, relying on up to a dozen massive databases jam-packed with millions of medical-claims records dating to 1995. Madigan leads a team of researchers, including two Columbia post-doctoral scholars and one Ph.D.