About the Authors

Keith B. Hoffman

Affiliation AdverseEvents, Inc., Healdsburg, California, United States of America

Christina Kraus

Affiliation AdverseEvents, Inc., Healdsburg, California, United States of America

Mo Dimbil

Affiliation AdverseEvents, Inc., Healdsburg, California, United States of America

Beatrice A. Golomb

bgolomb@ucsd.edu

Affiliations Department of Medicine, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California, United States of America, Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, University of California San Diego La Jolla, California, United States of America

Competing Interests

Authors Keith Hoffman, Christina Kraus, and Mo Dimbil work for Adverse Events, Inc. which produced the RxFilter software used in this paper. There is no financial conflict regarding the focus of the paper: That there are adverse event reports for statins within the FDA AERS database is not in dispute; and there is no rationale by which this company affiliation would bias a comparative analysis of agents within a class, such as that presented. Although the software will not be made available, the methods have been elucidated by which the results can be replicated without this software. This does not alter the authors' adherence to all the PLoS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: KBH. Performed the experiments: KBH CK MD. Analyzed the data: KBH BAG. Wrote the paper: KBH BAG. Significant critical input: KBH BAG.