Methods Projects

In this large study of 4,103,700 pregnant women, fluconazole use during pregnancy was associated with an increased risk of fetal death, but not congenital malformation, relative to use of vaginal azole antifungals.

Current use of domperidone may increase the risk of ventricular tachyarrhythmia and sudden cardiac death (VT/SCD) in patients with Parkinson’s disease, particularly those with a history of cardiovascular disease.

There is low compliance to the isotretinoin pregnancy prevention program in Canada.

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.

We review some methodological challenges facing drug safety networks such as CNODES and Sentinel.

We illustrate the confounding that can occur due to drug formulary restrictions using the example of fluticasone/salmeterol combination therapy, whose use is restricted in the province of Quebec, Canada. We found that formulary restrictions can result in substantial and unexpected confounding and should be considered during the design and analysis of pharmacoepidemiologic studies.