The Association Between Arthralgia and Vedolizumab Using Natural Language Processing

Background The gut-selective nature of vedolizumab has raised questions regarding increased joint pain or arthralgia with its use in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) patients. As arthralgias are seldom coded and thus difficult to study, few studies have examined the comparative risk of arthralgia between vedolizumab and tumor necrosis factor inhibitor (TNFi). Our objectives were to evaluate the application of natural language processing (NLP) to identify arthralgia in the clinical notes and to compare the risk of arthralgia between vedolizumab and TNFi in IBD.