ATC/DDD for Drug Safety Assessment

In pharmacovigilance analyses using VigiBase® or other databases, disproportionality analysis is an acknowledged tool to support signal detection. Disproportionality metrics, e.g. the proportional reporting ratio (PRR), can be calculated based on the ATC classification. When PRR is applied at the level of ATC codes, the reporting rate of one specific event is calculated for a given ATC code and compared to the reporting rate of the event in all ICSRs of the database except those that contain one or more drugs from the ATC code of interest.