Evaluation of potential approaches for counting person-time in instances where no active comparator is present.

ABSTRACT: Emulating the target trial framework in pharmacoepidemiology is challenging when there is no active comparator. We evaluate six approaches to finding surrogate index dates for untreated patients with the goal of identifying one or more solutions that indicate they would give potentially unbiased results. This numerical experiment used 73,070 patients from the MarketScan administrative databases (2013-2019) with type II diabetes, first-line therapy with metformin, and second-line therapy with either sodium-glucose cotransporter 2 inhibitors (SGLT2i's) or sulfonylureas. Patients taking sulfonylureas were converted into an experimental "untreated" arm. Part 1 sought to find surrogate index dates for the untreated arm. Part 2 compared the experimental estimates of the effect of SGLT2i's on car

SUBMITTER: Giorgio K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12746849 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature