Methods Projects

This large, nationally representative study of opioid prescription patterns suggest that the introduction of a tamper-deterrent formulation of long-acting oxycodone, against a background of changes in public drug benefit policy, was associated with statistically significant, sustained changes in selection of long-acting opioids but only modest changes in the quantities of long-acting opioids dispensed.

Among venous thromboembolism patients, treatment with DOACs when compared to warfarin is not associated with an increased risk for major bleeding or all-cause mortality.

Using bisacodyl in combination with commonly prescribed colonoscopy bowel cleansers was not associated with increased risk of ischemic colitis, major adverse renal outcomes, or death.

Through simulations, we show that, in the presence of weight model misspecification in a marginal structural Cox model context, with a rich and diverse set of candidate algorithms, 'Super Learner' can generally offer a better alternative to the commonly used logistic regression or statistical learning approaches.

Using plasmode and Monte-Carlo simulation studies, we evaluates the performance of TMLE compared to that of IPW estimators based on a point-exposure cohort study of the marginal causal effect of post-myocardial infarction statin use on the 1-year risk of all-cause mortality from the Clinical Practice Research Datalink. Near violations of the positivity assumption are investigated in a high-dimensional covariate setting for both methods.

We illustrate the practical implementation of a newly proposed double robust estimator “Targeted Maximum Likelihood Estimation” (TMLE) and demonstrated its application in common pharmacoepidemiological settings. A real-word example using the clinical practice research datalink is used with a high-dimensional covariate space.