Pharmacoepidemiology – current opportunities and challenges
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5324/nje.v11i1.527Sammendrag
ABSTRACT
Pharmacoepidemiology is defined as the the study of the use and the effects of drugs in large groups of
people. It can be viewed as an epidemiological discipline with particular focus on drugs. The Scandinavians
pioneered the developement of methods to study drug utilization. The ATC and DDD methodology is now a
widely accepted consensus on how to categorise drugs and compare sales of drugs of different potency. The
hierachy of available designs to study drug effects is described. There is an inverse relationship between the
validity of a study design and its resource requirements. One of the most pervasive methodological problems
of pharmacoepidemiology is the possibility of confounding by indication. Often, such confounding can only
be handled by mounting a randomised trial. If a trial is unethical or unfeasible, the research question has the
potential of becoming af standing controversy. The emergence of large population based prescription databases
is an exciting new development in pharmacoepidemiology. The validity of drug exposure data is discussed.
It is established that data from a pharmacy based database should be preferred over data from a GP
based database. Whether interview data are preferable to dispensing data can not be established in general
but may occasionally be inferred from the context of the research question.
Downloads
Nedlastinger
Publisert
Hvordan referere
Utgave
Seksjon
Lisens
Norsk Epidemiologi licenses all content of the journal under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence. This means, among other things, that anyone is free to copy and distribute the content, as long as they give proper credit to the author(s) and the journal. For further information, see Creative Commons website for human readable or lawyer readable versions.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
