Statins and nonsteroidal anti‐inflammatory drugs—an analysis of prescription symmetry

Increased risk of hip fracture in the elderly associated with prochlorperazine: is a prescribing cascade contributing?

“…Prescription sequence symmetry analysis has been used to examine associations between a range of clinical issues and therapeutic classes of medicines, including cardiovascular medicines and adverse events and medicines with the potential to cause functional dyspepsia 12, 28–30. It has been advocated as a potentially important tool for post‐marketing surveillance and the monitoring of adverse drug events of relatively short‐term latency, using population‐based data 13, 29, 30. Its advantages are that it is fast and uses the individual patients as their own controls thereby minimising any potential biases caused by individual variations.…”

Exploring New Zealand prescription data using sequence symmetry analyses for predicting adverse drug reactions

“…The practicality of PSSA to predict ADRs has been confirmed in several studies . These studies have examined medicine initiation as a proxy for a potential ADR.…”

The validity of sequence symmetry analysis (SSA) for adverse drug reaction signal detection

“…The time window of the SSA is the period within which the sequence of medicines must occur to be included in the analysis. Previous studies have used time windows ranging from 100 days to 33 months . Use of different time windows may impact on the validity of the observed results.…”

“…Previous studies have used SSA to identify known and potential safety signals of medicines, [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] including cough induced by angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitor, depression induced by calcium channel blocker and stroke induced by non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medicine. 2,9,11 These studies have demonstrated the usefulness of SSA in detecting ADRs on a case-bycase basis, but the validity of the method has not yet been assessed systematically.…”

“…Previous studies have used time windows ranging from 100 days to 33 months. 2,4,5,7,8,12 Use of different time windows may impact on the validity of the observed results. To our knowledge, the optimal time window for SSA has not yet been established.…”