Is it possible to receive complaint count in monthly format?

Question

I'm currently using the following function to get complaints on certain drugs over time. However, the output gives me the number of reported complaints on a daily basis. It would help me a great deal if I could get the number of reported complaints on a monthly basis.

https://api.fda.gov/drug/event.json?search=receivedate:[20110101+TO+20150101]+AND+brand_name:lantus&count=receivedate

If anyone can help it would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Here is a small Python snippet that takes your URL and produces a output that you can load into Excel.

import requests
from collections import defaultdict
monthly = defaultdict(int)

url = 'https://api.fda.gov/drug/event.json?search=receivedate:[20110101+TO+20150101]+AND+brand_name:lantus&count=receivedate'
r = requests.get(url)
r = r.json()
data = r.get(u'results',u'')

for item in data:
    count = item.get(u'count',u'')
    ddate = item.get(u'time',u'')
    if ddate != u'' and count != u'':
        dkey = ''.join(ddate[0:4])+'-'+''.join(ddate[4:6])
        monthly[dkey] += int(count)

for item in monthly:
    print item, monthly.get(item)

Gives as an output:

2011-08 569
2011-09 505
2011-02 432
2011-03 462
2011-01 439
2011-06 560
....

Which is in an Excel-importable format.

Answer 2

If you're just looking to see stats by month we have graphs on ResearchAE.com

Disclosure: I created ResearchAE.com

Answer 3

There is no API endpoint or query to aggregate by month. You can submit a feature request to https://github.com/fda/openfda/issues however.

We had this same question/issue and identified two potential solutions:

1. Like @phileshem proposed in his answer to your question, you can aggregate in your application code. Phil provided an example in Python. I have Ruby code somewhere if you need/prefer.
2. Much less optimally for both you and the openFDA web services is to do many receivedate:[X to Y] API calls. I would suggest against this but it is an option.