Methodological evaluation of bias in observational coronavirus disease 2019 studies on drug effectiveness.

ABSTRACT:

Background and objective

Observational studies may provide valuable evidence on real-world causal effects of drug effectiveness in patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). As patients are usually observed from hospital admission to discharge and drug initiation starts during hospitalization, advanced statistical methods are needed to account for time-dependent drug exposure, confounding and competing events. Our objective is to evaluate the observational studies on the three common methodological pitfalls in time-to-event analyses: immortal time bias, confounding bias and competing risk bias.

Methods

We performed a systematic literature search on 23 October 2020, in the PubMed database to identify observational cohort studies that evaluated drug effectiveness in ho

SUBMITTER: Martinuka O 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8015394 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature