Title 6. CASE SERIES & SURVEY OF DRUG USE.pdf ✅

PHARMD GURU Page 2 ADVANTAGES:  Useful for hypothesis generation.  Informative for very rare disease with few established risk factors.  Characterizes averages for disorder. DISADVANTAGES:  Cannot study cause and effect relationships.  Cannot assess disease frequency. EXAMPLE OF THE CASE SERIES STUDY: During 1950, 8 cases of cancer lung were admitted to different hospitals during the same period of time. Taking history from these patients showed that they were miners. This unusual circumstance suggested that the miners may be exposed to something. Investigating this circumstance showed high concentration of radon gas. A hypothesis was formulated that lung cancer is related to exposure to radon. SURVEY OF DRUG USE:  Surveys of medicines like case series and case reports are observational descriptive studies in pharmacoepidemiology.  They are qualitative (descriptive) non- experimental method and are considered as effective tools in promoting health care and framing policy documents related to drug use.  Surveys often take simple format and provide crude data. The health surveys have primarily had their origin in the charting of major diseases in the population and etiological research.  Pharmacoepidemiological research based on drug surveys has been scattered and taken place in different research groups at global levels in different settings.  Drugs comprise the most common treatment and one of the most rapidly increasing costs in health care. There may be several explanations for the low research output. One of the reasons may be the poor access to information from issued prescriptions.  There are many areas in drug use where surveys can generate useful information and knowledge. University level surveys in the developed countries by pharmacy