Current medical research and opinion
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Medication non-adherence is a widespread problem and has been known to be associated with worse health outcomes and increased healthcare costs. Although many measures of adherence have been developed, their usage is not consistent across studies. Furthermore, statistical methods for analyzing adherence measures have not been rigorously evaluated. ⋯ We discourage dichotomizing adherence data as it results in low power. The negative binomial model offers advantages in modeling adherence data, as it avoids the problematic use of a ratio in regression models. The ordinal logistic regression is robust to distributional assumptions with greater power, but naivete to treatment should be adjusted to reserve type I error rate. We also provide a recommendation for defining the observation window in calculating PDC.
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Randomized Controlled Trial Multicenter Study
Quality of oral anticoagulation control in Chinese patients with non-valvular atrial fibrillation: a prospective controlled study.
The sex, age, medical history, treatment, tobacco use, race risk (SAMe-TT2R2) Score; the sex, age, medical history, treatment, tobacco use, genotype combination (SAMe-TT2G2) Score; and the so-called modified SAMe-TT2R2 scores have been proposed to predict the anticoagulation quality for patients with non-valvular atrial fibrillation (NVAF). The data from a prospective controlled study is used to validate the SAMe-TT2R2 and SAMe-TT2G2 scores in Chinese NVAF patients treated with warfarin and to evaluate the association of factors with time in therapeutic range (TTR) to predict the quality of oral anticoagulation control. ⋯ A warfarin-dosing algorithm used for initial treatment of patients older than 60 helps to achieve a better quality of oral anticoagulation control, whereas concomitant torasemide can produce a negative effect. These findings provide useful information for future investigations on the quality of oral anticoagulation control in Chinese anticoagulation clinical practice.
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Inflammatory bowel diseases (IBDs) are a public health issue with over 3.5 million patients in Europe, but the advent of several biologic agents has completely changed their management. Pharmacovigilance is needed to early detect expected/unexpected adverse events (AEs) to assess the safety of drugs in a real-world setting. Aim of this prospective pharmacovigilance study was to evaluate the occurrence of AEs in patients treated with biologic drugs in gastroenterology units in Southern Italy. ⋯ Overall, considering the low rate of AEs reported and discontinuation from therapy, our data seems to confirm the positive beneficial/risk ratio of biologic treatment for IBDs and provide useful data on biologic drugs in gastroenterology.
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Although existing studies have compared clinical efficacy and pharmacokinetics of generic with brand tacrolimus, little is known about generic tacrolimus utilization patterns or factors predicting generic substitution. This study examines associations between patient-level factors and generic tacrolimus initiation or substitution among new users of oral generic or brand-name tacrolimus. ⋯ Understanding associations between patient-level factors with generic tacrolimus initiation and substitution could help practitioners and policymakers monitor treatment effect and facilitate generic tacrolimus utilization.
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To determine the impact of telemental health (TMH) use on total healthcare costs and mental health (MH)-related costs paid by a third party among adults with mental health conditions (MHC). ⋯ Despite having a higher likelihood of MH services use and MH-related costs, TMH users did not have higher total costs as compared to adults using only in-person MH services. Our findings suggest that TMH can increase access to MH care without increasing total healthcare costs among adults with MHC. Future studies exploring whether TMH use can lead to cost-savings over a longer period are warranted.