Applying anatomical therapeutic chemical (ATC) and critical term ontologies to Australian drug safety data for association rules and adverse event signalling

• Authors: Gary Saunders;Sasa Ivkovic;Ranadhir Ghosh;John Yearwood
• Venue: AOW '05 Proceedings of the 2005 Australasian Ontology Workshop - Volume 58
• Year: 2005

The sparse nature of voluntarily reported drug safety data benefits from a system that consolidates the massive amount of data into a manageable format for analysis. This has been done for Australian drug safety data by the Australian Adverse Drug Reaction Advisory Committee (ADRAC) for reactions using the systems organ class (SOC) ontology. There has long been a need for a similar kind of grouping to apply to drugs in this type of data. In ADRAC, drugs are currently listed by trade-name, where only some of these trade-names were assigned anatomical-therapeutic-chemical classification (ATC) codes. We assigned an ATC code for each ADRAC trade-name and show that this ontology facilitates the detection of drug class / reaction class associations at various levels of specificity. This allows different views of these associations (even very rare ones) and their significance measured for the development of more sensitive signal detection methods. We report that this ATC classification enables both the grouping of association rule approach that is useful for studying rare associations, and the development of an adverse reaction signal detection method.