  Drug Names, Population Level Surveillance and the FDA's Adverse Event
Reporting System: An Exploratory Data Survey of Drug Name Incidence and
Prevalence, 2004-2012Q2 Purpose: To count and monitor the drug names reported
in the publicly available version of the Federal Adverse Event Reporting System
(FAERS) from 2004 to 2012Q2 in a maximized sensitivity relational model.
Methods: Data mining and data modeling was conducted and event based summary
statistics with plots were created from over nine continuous years of
continuous FAERS data. Results: This FAERS model contains 344,452 individual
drug names and 432,541,994 count references which occurred across 4,148,761
human subjects in the 34 quarter study period. Plots for the top 100 scoring
drug name references are reported by year and quarter; the top 100 drug names
contain 143,384,240 references or 33% of all drug name references over 34
quarters of continuous FAERS data. Conclusions: While FAERS contains many drugs
and adverse event reports, its data pertains to very few of them. Drug name
incidence lends timely and effective surveillance of large populations of
Averse Event Reports and does not require the cause of the AE, nor its validity
to be known to detect a mass poisoning.
