A comparison of measures of disproportionality for signal detection in spontaneous reporting systems for adverse drug reactions

The Reporting Odds Ratio--1.96 standard errors (SE), proportional reporting ratio--1.96 SE, Yule's Q--1.96 SE, the Poisson probability and Chi-square test of all 17,330 combinations were compared with the IC minus 2 standard deviations. Additionally, the concordance of the various tests, in respect to the number of reports per combination, was examined.

In general, sensitivity was high in respect to the reference measure when a combination of point- and precision estimate was used. The concordance increased dramatically when the number of reports per combination increased.