Analysis of Information on Drug Adverse Reactions Using US Food and Drug Administration Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS)

Nowadays, medical big data has been developed and made available in a variety of fields such as epidemiology and pharmacovigilance. Spontaneous reporting databases are one category of medical big data and that has been adequate for analysing events related to side effects that rarely occur in general practice. These data are freely available in several countries. In Japan, the Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency has developed the Japanese Adverse Drug Event Report (JADER), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) developed the FDA Adverse Events Reporting System (FAERS) in the United States. Since the release of these medical big data, many researchers in academic and research setting have accessed them, but it is still difficult for many medical professionals to analyse these data due to costs and operation of requisite statistical software. In this section, we give some tips to study spontaneous reporting databases resulting from our learning experiences.