At Plausible Capture Rate, Drug Rxn's kill 1 in 3
Post #640
Passive surveillance systems like FDA’s FAERS system effectively capture somewhere between 2% and 18% of the underlying adverse events which occur — i.e., the interquartile range of estimates from 37 published studies.
For the sake of example, this analysis will assume that every report was legitimate. But back in 2017, there were 1.8 million total reports and 164,000 deaths reported in relation to adverse drug events — right in line with the overall proportion (9%) of reports being fatal ones:
If the more liberal value for passive-surveillance capture (18%) is used, then this indicates that ( 164,000/0.18 = ) 911,111 people were killed by drug reactions in 2017.
But only a grand total of 2,813,503 people died in 2017, making it so that 1 out of every 3 recorded deaths in 2017 came from an adverse reaction to a drug. It also makes drug reactions the top cause of death in the USA, beating out heart disease (647,457).
Pharmaceuticals were the top-killer of Americans.
If the assumptions are even roughly accurate, then pharmaceutical drugs are the top cause of death in the USA. While this analysis makes an unfounded assumption (every single death report was legitimate), it indicates that “death-by-medicine” is much, much higher than reported elsewhere.
Reference
[plausible range of under-reporting rates is 82% to 98%] — Hazell L, Shakir SA. Under-reporting of adverse drug reactions : a systematic review. Drug Saf. 2006;29(5):385-96. doi: 10.2165/00002018-200629050-00003. PMID: 16689555. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16689555/
[164,000 death reports in 2017] — Daluwatte C, Schotland P, Strauss DG, Burkhart KK, Racz R. Predicting potential adverse events using safety data from marketed drugs. BMC Bioinformatics. 2020 Apr 29;21(1):163. doi: 10.1186/s12859-020-3509-7. PMID: 32349656; PMCID: PMC7191698. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7191698/
[2.8 million deaths and 647,000 of them from heart disease in 2017] — Kochanek KD, Murphy SL, Xu J, Arias E. Deaths: Final Data for 2017. Natl Vital Stat Rep. 2019 Jun;68(9):1-77. PMID: 32501199. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_09-508.pdf
[FAERS dashboard] — FDA. https://www.fda.gov/drugs/questions-and-answers-fdas-adverse-event-reporting-system-faers/fda-adverse-event-reporting-system-faers-public-dashboard