Adverse Drug Events in the Prevention and Treatment of COVID-19: A Data Mining Study on FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) (Preprint)
BACKGROUND In the emergency situation of COVID-19, off-label therapies and newly developed vaccines may bring the patients adverse drug event (ADE) risks. Data mining based on spontaneous reporting systems (SRSs) is a promising and efficient way to detect potential ADEs so as to help health professionals and patients get rid of these risks. OBJECTIVE This pharmacovigilance study aimed to investigate the ADEs of “Hot Drugs” in COVID-19 prevention and treatment based on the data of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) adverse event reporting system (FAERS). METHODS FAERS ADE reports associated with COVID-19 from the 2nd quarter of 2020 to the 2nd quarter of 2021 were retrieved with “Hot Drugs” and frequent ADEs recognized. A combination of support, proportional reporting ratio (PRR) and Chi-square (2) test was applied to detect significant “Hot Drug” & ADE signals by Python programming language on Jupyter notebook. RESULTS 13,178 COVID-19 cases were retrieved with 18 “Hot Drugs” and 312 frequent ADEs on “Preferred Term” (PT) level. 18 312 = 5,616 “Drug & ADE” candidates were formed for further data mining. The algorithm finally produced 219 significant ADE signals associated with 17 “Hot Drugs”and 124 ADEs.Some unexpected ADE signals were observed for chloroquine, ritonavir, tocilizumab, Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 Vaccine and Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine. CONCLUSIONS Data mining is a promising and efficient way to assist pharmacovigilance work and the result of this paper could help timely recognize ADEs in the prevention and treatment of COVID-19.