Knowledge discovery and visualization of clusters for erythromycin related adverse events in the FDA drug adverse event reporting system

Abstract

In this paper, a research study to discover hidden knowledge in the reports of the public release of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)’s Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) for erythromycin is presented. Erythromycin is an antibiotic used to treat certain infections caused by bacteria. Bacterial infections can cause significant morbidity, mortality, and the costs of treatment are known to be detrimental to health institutions around the world. Since erythromycin is of great interest in medical research, the relationships between patient demographics, adverse event outcomes, and the adverse events of this drug were analyzed. The FDA’s FAERS database was used to create a dataset for cluster analysis in order to gain some statistical insights. The reports contained within the dataset consist of 3792 (44.1%) female and 4798 (55.8%) male patients. The mean age of each patient is 41.759. The most frequent adverse event reported is oligohtdramnios and the most frequent adverse event outcome is OT(Other). Cluster analysis was used for the analysis of the dataset using the DBSCAN algorithm, and according to the results, a number of clusters and associations were obtained, which are reported here. It is believed medical researchers and pharmaceutical companies can utilize these results and test these relationships within their clinical studies. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014.