Comparing Sources of Drug Data about the Elderly

Abstract

An automated prescription system is an adequate source of information about the prescription drugs currently being taken by frail elderly HMO enrollees with a prepaid prescription drug benefit.

Do Statins Affect Androgen Levels in Men? Results from the Boston Area Community Health Survey

“…A strength of our study is that most our statin exposure information was reflected in a drug inventory. In-home drug inventory collection methods have been found to correspond well with a ''gold standard'' of external pharmacy records (45). In addition, we had the ability to measure other medications and include them in our analyses, lending more confidence that our findings are not due to a medication correlated with statin use.…”

Recall of drug utilization depends on subtle structural questionnaire characteristics

“…The patterns of drug utilization described in surveys that employ different methods may not be directly comparable, and the misclassification of exposure compromises the internal validity also in analytical studies. The accuracy of self-reported information has been studied in groups of patients treated for different diseases and using distinct gold-standards, and has been shown to depend on the type of drug, the duration of drug use, time since the last prescription was filled and the number of drugs that were used [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. In addition, questionnaires directed for specific drugs or drug indications tend to be more sensitive than those relying on open ended questions [2,8,9].…”

Azithromycin and the Risk of Cardiovascular Death

“…Antibiotics and other medications that patients had taken were identified from Medicaid pharmacy files. 19,[21][22][23] The cohort included patients who had been prescribed azithromycin between 1992 (when azithromycin was introduced in the United States) and 2006 and met the eligibility criteria on the date on which the prescription was filled. These criteria were formulated to exclude persons at high risk for death from causes unrelated to a shortterm effect of proarrhythmic medication (Tables 1 and 2 in the Supplementary Appendix, available with the full text of this article at NEJM.org).…”