Investigating the link between drug consumption and adverse events reporting in France

The objective of this study is to examine the potential association between drug use and adverse event reporting in France. A number of drug users and cases reported were extracted from the French Health Care Insurance database (Open Medic) and the French pharmacovigilance database. We performed two separate mixed-effect models (with a drug used or reporting rate as dependent variables) with a random intercept for drug classes. We selected 62 drugs from 10 drug classes, for which 177 364 cases were reported in the French pharmacovigilance database in 2020. The results showed a strong association between drug users and the number of reported cases in France among each drug class (P < 0.01). Within a drug class, the number of reported cases is, therefore, a proxy for the exposure to a given drug in the population. This finding could be useful to approximate and compare drug exposure from pharmacovigilance databases.