Insights Into the Nutritional Prevention of Macular Degeneration based on a Comparative Topic Modeling Approach
This work addresses the challenge of evidence synthesis in medical research by providing a systematic approach to prioritize topics for further study, though it is incremental as it builds on existing NLP methods for meta-analysis.
The paper tackled the problem of analyzing contradictory results in nutritional studies for macular degeneration prevention by proposing a comparative topic modeling method to identify topics associated with significant effects, which validated four compounds (omega-3 fatty acids, copper, zeaxanthin, nitrates) and flagged two (niacin, molybdenum) as less supported.
Topic modeling and text mining are subsets of Natural Language Processing (NLP) with relevance for conducting meta-analysis (MA) and systematic review (SR). For evidence synthesis, the above NLP methods are conventionally used for topic-specific literature searches or extracting values from reports to automate essential phases of SR and MA. Instead, this work proposes a comparative topic modeling approach to analyze reports of contradictory results on the same general research question. Specifically, the objective is to identify topics exhibiting distinct associations with significant results for an outcome of interest by ranking them according to their proportional occurrence in (and consistency of distribution across) reports of significant effects. The proposed method was tested on broad-scope studies addressing whether supplemental nutritional compounds significantly benefit macular degeneration (MD). Four of these were further supported in terms of effectiveness upon conducting a follow-up literature search for validation (omega-3 fatty acids, copper, zeaxanthin, and nitrates). The two not supported by the follow-up literature search (niacin and molybdenum) also had scores in the lowest range under the proposed scoring system, suggesting that the proposed methods score for a given topic may be a viable proxy for its degree of association with the outcome of interest and can be helpful in the search for potentially causal relationships. These results underpin the proposed methods potential to add specificity in understanding effects from broad-scope reports, elucidate topics of interest for future research, and guide evidence synthesis in a systematic and scalable way. All of this is accomplished while yielding valuable insights into the prevention of MD.