Making Sense of Pharmacovigilance and Drug Adverse Event Reporting: Comparative Similarity Association Analysis Using...

Drug-associated adverse events cause approximately 30 billion dollars a year of added health care expense, along with negative health outcomes including patient death. This constitutes a major public health concern. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires drug labeling to include potential adverse effects for each newly developed drug product. With the advancement in incidence of adverse drug events (ADEs) and potential adverse drug events, published studies have mainly concluded potential ADEs from labeling documents obtained from the FDA's preapproval clinical trials, and very few analyzed their research work based on reported ADEs after widespread use of a drug to animal subjects. The aforesaid procedure of deriving practice based on information from preapproval labeling may misrepresent or deprecate the incidence and prevalence of specific ADEs. In this study, we make the most of the recently disseminated ADE data by the FDA for animal drugs and devices used in animals to address this public and welfare concern. For this purpose, we implemented 5 different methods (Pearson distance, Spearman distance, cosine distance, Yule distance, and Euclidean distance) to determine the most efficient and robust approach to properly discover highly associated ADEs from the reported data and accurately exclude noise-induced reported events, while maintaining a high level of correlation precision. Our comparative analysis of ADEs based on an artificial intelligence (AI) approach for the 5 robust similarity methods revealed high ADE associations for 2 drugs used in dogs and cats. In addition, the described distance methods systematically analyzed and compared ADEs from the drug labeling sections with a specific emphasis on analyzing serious ADEs. Our finding showed that the cosine method significantly outperformed all the other methods by correctly detecting and validating ADEs based on the comparative similarity association analysis compared with ADEs reported by preapproval clinical trials, premarket testing, or postapproval complication experience of FDA-approved animal drugs.