Journal of Pharmaceutical Care & Health Systems
Open Access

Epidemiologic Methods in Pharmacoepidemiology

Osman Khan^{* *}Correspondence: Osman Khan, Department of Pharmacy, Sindh University, Jamshoro, Pakistan, Email:

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Description

Pharmacoepidemiology is the study of pharmaceutical use and impacts in large groups of the population, combining clinical pharmacology and epidemiology or the study of drug use and effects in large groups of people, and it provides an estimate of the likelihood of positive effects and the likelihood of negative effects in a population. It's been termed a "bridge science" because it encompasses both clinical pharmacology and epidemiology. Pharmacoepidemiology focuses on clinical patient outcomes from therapeutics by applying clinical epidemiology methods to better understand the determinants of beneficial and adverse drug effects, genetic variation's effects on drug effects, duration-response relationships, clinical effects of drug-drug interactions, and the effects of medication non-adherence. The study of drug usage and consequences in large groups of people is known as pharmacoepidemiology.

Pharmacoepidemiology concepts are used to obtain more insight into the efficacy, and notably the safety, of new medications after they have progressed from limited exposure in controlled therapeutic pre-registration studies of community use. Pharmacoepidemiology is a branch of epidemiology that examines medication usage in populations using epidemiological methods in order to promote the judicious use of pharmaceuticals and improve health outcomes. Drug use trends and harmful drug effects are quantified in pharmacoepidemiology investigations. Pharmacoepidemiology is concerned with pharmaceuticals and their pharmacological evaluations, as well as the various methodologies used in epidemiology to analyze the benefits, hazards, and use of drugs in real-life. It entails the analysis of a single person or large groups of people over a long period of time. It entails obtaining and analyzing data in order to determine possible causes and related factors, which can be applied in clinical practice to groups of people as well as individuals receiving therapy. There are specific ways of measuring drug exposure, as well as signs of drug compliance and misuse. Pharmacoepidemiology is concerned with medications and their pharmacological evaluations, as well as epidemiological methodologies. As a result, its methodology is observational, which is in contrast to the experimental method employed in phase I, II, or III clinical studies. In pharmacoepidemiology, a case-control study can be used to assess the relationship between a medicine and an unobserved (desirable or not) incident during clinical trials. Case-control studies are particularly useful for discovering rare or delayed-onset events since they include cases for analysis first. Pharmacoepidemiology is the study of pharmacological effects on human populations using epidemiological ideas and methods. The purpose of this field is to systematically characterize, control, and forecast the effects and applications of pharmacological treatments.

The goal of pharmacoepidemiology in the pre-approval drug development phase is to better understand the target population and indication. In this sense, it can be very useful to determine which segments of the target population were included in the clinical trial programme and thus which segments of the population may require additional follow-up after approval. During the development phase, pharmacoepidemiology investigations should be used to identify the primary comorbidities of the underlying condition as well as any links between the experimental medication and these comorbidities. The randomized controlled trial, preferably double-blinded, has long been the mainstay of drug research due to the numerous factors that might alter both exposure and response to pharmacological therapy. These randomized designs reduce the impact of known and unknown confounding factors, both those influencing the physician's decision to prescribe and those influencing patient response, in order to ensure that different treatment groups are as similar as possible at baseline, allowing the impact (both benefits and risks) of the new treatment to be adequately assessed. Pharmacovigilance is an important feature of pharmacoepidemiology since it tracks the effects of a medicine on people who are using it. Medicines can be tracked for evidence of adverse occurrences, and post-marketing actions. Pharmacoepidemiology is a branch of epidemiology that studies drug use, abuse, clinical effectiveness, adverse drug responses.

Conclusion

The advancement of pharmacoepidemiology has enabled better drug use optimization. It affects healthcare. Pharmacoepidemiology benefits from the methodology developed in general epidemiology and may further develop them for applications of methodology unique to needs of pharmacoepidemiology. There are also some areas that are altogether unique to pharmacoepidemiology, e.g., pharmacovigilance. Pharmacovigilance is a type of continual monitoring of unwanted effects and other safety-related aspects of drugs that are already placed in current growing integrating markets.