Procedure for Organizing a Post-FDA-approval Evaluation of Antidepressants

Farrokh Alemi; Hua Min; Melanie Yousefi; Laura K Becker; Christopher A Hane; Vijay S Nori; William H Crown

doi:10.7759/cureus.29884

Procedure for Organizing a Post-FDA-approval Evaluation of Antidepressants

Cureus. 2022 Oct 3;14(10):e29884. doi: 10.7759/cureus.29884. eCollection 2022 Oct.

Authors

Farrokh Alemi¹, Hua Min², Melanie Yousefi³, Laura K Becker⁴, Christopher A Hane⁵, Vijay S Nori⁶, William H Crown⁷

Affiliations

¹ Health Adminstration and Policy, George Mason University, Fairfax, USA.
² Health Administration and Policy, George Mason University, Fairfax, USA.
³ School of Nursing, George Mason University, Fairfax, USA.
⁴ Analytics, OptumLabs, Eden Prairie, USA.
⁵ Data Science, OptumLabs, Eden Prairie, USA.
⁶ Engineering, OptumLabs, Eden Prairie, USA.
⁷ Research, The Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University, Waltham, USA.

Abstract

Purpose: The study reports the construction of a cohort used to study the effectiveness of antidepressants.

Methods: The cohort includes experiences of 3,678,082 patients with depression in the United States on antidepressants between January 1, 2001, and December 31, 2018. A total of 10,221,145 antidepressant treatment episodes were analyzed. Patients who had no utilization of health services for at least two years, or who had died, were excluded from the analysis. Follow-up was passive, automatic, and collated from fragmented clinical services of diverse providers.

Results: The average follow-up was 2.93 years, resulting in 15,096,055 person-years of data. The mean age of the cohort was 46.54 years (standard deviation of 17.48) at first prescription of antidepressant, which was also the enrollment event (16.92% were over 65 years), and most were female (69.36%). In 10,221,145 episodes, within the first 100 days of start of the episode, 4,729,372 (46.3%) continued their treatment, 1,306,338 (12.8%) switched to another medication, 3,586,156 (35.1%) discontinued their medication, and 599,279 (5.9%) augmented their treatment.

Conclusions: We present a procedure for constructing a cohort using claims data. A surrogate measure for self-reported symptom remission based on the patterns of use of antidepressants has been proposed to address the absence of outcomes in claims. Future studies can use the procedures described here to organize studies of the comparative effectiveness of antidepressants.

Keywords: administrative data; antidepressants; cohorts; depression; effectiveness.