Analytical studies in drug utilization research

Le résumé fourni par la source

Analytical drug utilization studies aim to explain why drugs are prescribed, dispensed, or used.They may also assess longitudinal patterns of drug dispensing in individual patients, such as discontinuation, switching, and combinations with new drugs.• The cohort study provides the highest level of evidence among the observational studies.Cohort studies are longitudinal analyses following people prospectively over time to study one or more outcomes.In DUR, common outcomes of interest are the initiation of drug therapy or changes in drug use patterns, including discontinuation and switching.• Case-control studies investigate exposures happening to people in the past, starting from a group of cases where the outcome is present and controls where the outcome is absent and going back to the cause(s).These are common when drug use is the exposure but uncommon when drug use is the outcome, e.g., in studies of factors associated with drug treatment.Most such studies are cross-sectional studies, which primarly is a descriptive study design.• In DUR, cohort studies, as well as case-control studies, can be based on a primary data collection or on data extracted from existing databases.• The three main error types to be aware of when conducting and interpreting analytical studies are selection bias, information bias, and confounding.• There are also other semi-analytical designs that may be used in addressing analytical questions in DUR, including case population studies and prescription sequence symmetry design.

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