Initiator Types and the Causal Question of the Prevalent New-User Design: A Simulation Study.

ABSTRACT: New-user designs restricting to treatment initiators have become the preferred design for studying drug comparative safety and effectiveness using nonexperimental data. This design reduces confounding by indication and healthy-adherer bias at the cost of smaller study sizes and reduced external validity, particularly when assessing a newly approved treatment compared with standard treatment. The prevalent new-user design includes adopters of a new treatment who switched from or previously used standard treatment (i.e., the comparator), expanding study sample size and potentially broadening the study population for inference. Previous work has suggested the use of time-conditional propensity-score matching to mitigate prevalent user bias. In this study, we describe 3 "types" of initiators o

SUBMITTER: Webster-Clark M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8245871 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature