Methods to generate and validate a Pregnancy Register in the UK Clinical Practice Research Datalink primary care database.

ABSTRACT:

Purpose

Primary care databases are increasingly used for researching pregnancy, eg, the effects of maternal drug exposures. However, ascertaining pregnancies, their timing, and outcomes in these data is challenging. While individual studies have adopted different methods, no systematic approach to characterise all pregnancies in a primary care database has yet been published. Therefore, we developed a new algorithm to establish a Pregnancy Register in the UK Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) GOLD primary care database.

Methods

We compiled over 4000 read and entity codes to identify pregnancy-related records among women aged 11 to 49 years in CPRD GOLD. Codes were categorised by the stage or outcome of pregnancy to facilitate delineation of pregnancy episodes. We con

SUBMITTER: Minassian C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6618019 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature