To assess the effects of sex differences on reporting adverse events in people treated with antidiabetic drugs using two different databases including Korea’s spontaneous adverse event reporting system (KAERS) and center for Health Insurance Review ...
To assess the effects of sex differences on reporting adverse events in people treated with antidiabetic drugs using two different databases including Korea’s spontaneous adverse event reporting system (KAERS) and center for Health Insurance Review and Assessment (HIRA) databases.
Adverse event reports from KAERS database from January 1, 2016 to December 31, 2016 were collected. Drug-AE pairs reported together with antidiabetic drugs were included. The number of people diagnosed with diabetes and antidiabetic drug users were extracted from HIRA-National Patient Sample database. Reporting rate per 10,000 people was calculated by dividing drug-AE pairs with the number of diabetes patients or drug users. Sex difference was presented with reporting ratio of women to men.
Out of 30 types of adverse events classified by system organ class (SOC), 14 had reporting ratio of statistically significant in which 13 were reported more often in women than men. Women more frequently reported AEs throughout the whole drug classes. Specifically, women treated with GLP-1 receptor analogues (reporting ratio=2.33; 95% CI: 1.75-3.12) and SGLT-2 inhibitors (reporting ratio=2.1; 95% CI: 1.77-2.49) reported AEs 2 times as many cases as men. Even though the total number of adverse events reported by women (n=8,469) was larger than men (n=7,200), the number of serious adverse event reports in women (n=2,451) was smaller compared to men (n=2,654). We considered physiological mechanisms to explain sex disparities for reporting reproductive system (reporting ratio=3.79; 95% CI: 2.55-5.62), and hearing and vestibular disorder (reporting ratio=2.35; 95% CI: 1.24-4.44). For some sex deviations, however, such as application site disorder (reporting ratio=1.81; 95% CI: 1.50-2.20), gastro-intestinal disorders (reporting ratio=1.73; 95% CI:1.60-1.88), and psychiatric disorders (reporting ratio=1.72; 95% CI: 1.45-2.03) were thought to be simply frequently reported by women.
The estimated reporting ratio showed women report AEs related to antidiabetic drugs more often compared to men. This study results add a piece of evidence on the existence of sex differences in the actions of antidiabetic drugs in real world patients by using two large-scale databases.