Work

Primary non‐adherence and the new‐user design

Year: 2018

Type: article

Abstract: The new‐user design has been widely used in pharmacoepidemiology. By following patients from the initiation of a treatment, the new‐user design has several advantages over designs that begin follow‐up on prevalent users. The new‐user design allows study of the full time course of outcome risk after treatment initiation, with representation of early and late events. It also ensures appropriate temporal ordering of baseline confounders, exposures, and outcomes, avoiding adjustment for intermediate variables that may have been affected by treatment. Coupled with an active‐comparator design, new‐user approaches can mitigate the potential for immortal time‐bias and confounding by indication. The active comparator new‐user design helps to articulate clearly a causal question about the benefits and harms of starting a particular intervention in a more real‐world setting. These theoretical and conceptual advantages have led to the recommendation that such designs should be a default approach for comparative effectiveness research studies.

Source: Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety

DOI: 10.1002/pds.4403

Authors: Xiaojuan Li, Stephen R. Cole, Daniel Westreich, M. Alan Brookhart

Institution: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Language: English

Topic: Medication Adherence and Compliance

Subfield: Family Practice

Field: Medicine

Domain: Health Sciences

SDG: Good health and well-being

Open Access status: green