Patterns of anticonvulsant use and adverse drug events in older adults

摘要

Purpose: To examine indications for, duration of use, and rate of adverse drug events (ADE) attributable to anticonvulsant initiation, as adjudicated by expert review of electronic health records (EHR) of older adults. Methods: We identified a cohort of community dwelling Medicare beneficiaries with linked EHR (aged 65+, continuously enrolled with a large health system/until death between 2012 and 2014, n = 20 945) and drew a stratified EHR review sample (n = 1534). An expert reviewed all records to adjudicate anticonvulsant use, years of use, indication for use, and evidence of ADEs attributable to anticonvulsant initiation. After excluding patients with insufficient EHR data (n = 37; 2%), we reconstructed the cohort using inverse probability weights to resemble the original cohort of eligible beneficiaries (n = 20 380). Among incident users of a single anticonvulsant, we estimated the rate of ADEs and described the type and severity of ADEs.