La Pharmacoépidémiologie : Approche Méthodologie Et Champs D’application

Abstract

Pharmacoepidemiology is a discipline that studies the use of drugs and evaluation of their beneficial or adverse effects on a large populations. These are post-marketing observational studies that have emerged in the early sixties after the tragedy of thalidomide's use associated malformations. Conducting a pharmacoepidemiological study requires compliance with laws and monitoring a regulatory approach in order to ensure confidentiality and protection of personal data, it also requires good knowledge about drugs and diseases using the different available data sources. Pharmacoepidemiology incorporates epidemiology methods where the exposure factor is constituted by drug intake which the main types used are cohort, case-control and crosssectional studies. The application of these methods must be done according to quality criteria determined at the pharmacoepidemiology study conception, in order to minimize the effect of bias leading to false conclusions. Depending on the type of bias, the bias control can be done is several ways. They are divided into :  Selection Bias relative to the choice of an unrepresentative sample of the populationsource.  Information Bias referring to the parameter's way information that is collected.  Confounding Bias due to confounding factors.