Introduction to pharmacoepidemiology

Hello, everyone. I'm Angel Wong. I'm a pharmacoepidemiologist from London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Welcome to this talk. I'm going to talk about the "Introduction to Pharmacoepidemiology".

Here is the outline of the presentation. First of all, I'm going to talk about the definition of epidemiology and that consists of four important points. Then I'll move on to talk about our focus, pharmacoepidemiology, which is the subset of epidemiology. I'll give you some examples of my previous work in pharmacoepidemiology talking about the drug utilizations. Then moving on, we'll talk about some common study designs we use in pharmacoepidemiology. Those study designs can be used for post-market safety monitoring and drug repurposing. I'll give you two other examples to illustrate how we could do that.

For the epidemiology, we know the definition will be, the study of the distribution and determinants of health and disease in a specific population. Here in this definition, you can see four bolded facts which are the most important part of epidemiology. The main two areas is actually the distribution and determinants. For distribution, we're curious about time, place, and person. Who is affected by the disease? Where do the people get the disease and when would they get the disease? Is it seasonal? Is it yearly or monthly? That could be the distribution for epidemiology. The second main area will be determinants, which we also called risk factors because we're also curious about the risk factor of the disease, what could cause a disease. In that case, we also use another terminology which is exposure. What would be the exposure that can cause the disease? The third point is the disease itself. How would we define an outcome? There are some different examples for disease or other health outcomes. It could be deaths, it could be infections, or cardiovascular disease, or even quality of life. It can be used as an outcome. Then we're moving on to talk about populations. What are the populations that we're looking at that could be affected by the disease? Are there children? Are there older age? Please note that it's not individuals, it's populations. It's different from clinical medicine where they want to look at individual patients and talk about personalized medicine. It's about population and how would the population is being affected by the disease. Then after that, when I go through all different examples, I am always involved in these four points. When you understand the definition of epidemiology, it's not difficult to understand pharmacoepidemiology.