PharmD Info

Ayilya M wrote: ↑19 Apr 2020, 16:48 How do we choose an appropriate drug for doing Pharmacoeconomic studies in a secondary care hospital sector?

@Ayilya M

Selection of the comparison drug is the very important aspect of pharmacoeconomic studies. Your choice of drug should have any of the followings,

1. Drugs that produce same efficacy but different in costs

2. Drugs that are different in efficacy and also in cost

3. Drugs that control secondary long-term complications or risks

In general, if there is a uncertainty about the new drugs efficacy and its related health outcomes Or when you want to assess the outcome of any new drugs with the existing drug from your hospital formulary, the pharmcoeconomic analyis methods can be applied to make appropriate decisions. Read More about Decision Analysis and Decision Tree and etc.

Understand its NOT only limited to drugs you can include services and programs also for pharmacoeconomic analysis. e.g Impact of clinical pharmacist on cost of drug therapy in the ICU - Check this paper -https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 6412001296

There are lot of PE study methods are available, you need to find the relevant research question and use appropriate study designs to get the meaningful results and every study method has its own decision rules, listed the common studies which is used in PE Analysis.

• Cost Effectiveness Analysis

• Cost Benefit Analysis

• Cost Utility Analysis

• Cost Minimization Analysis

Secondary care hospital has its own set of drugs and services. You can very well conduct pharmacoeconomic studies by comparing your hospital drugs with new drugs which is available outside.

Ajithjohn wrote: ↑19 Apr 2020, 15:24 Can you suggest some primary data sources for the literature review for a study on drug safety?

@Ajithjohn

For any kind of study, the best primary data source for the literature search is PubMed. It is a free database with a huge number of indexed journals. Apart from this, you can also search the literature by using Google Scholar, Embase, EBSCO, Scopus, Web of Science, ProQuest, etc. based on the availability at your library. For the special focus on drug safety literature, you can do the hand search in websites of Drug Safety related journals (ex: Drug Safety, Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety).

Galeti harshalatha wrote: ↑19 Apr 2020, 19:48 How do we calculate sample size and what based we have to select sample size?

@Galeti harshalatha

Check this topic to know the basics of sample size calculations: post3309.html#p3309

bitubenny wrote: ↑19 Apr 2020, 13:15 While choosing articles for narrative review is it a must that it should contain Indian articles/studies , if yes, to what extend.

@bitubenny

It is not compulsory to include Indian articles in the narrative review. It is completely based on the topic you selected. If you feel there are Indian studies on the topic you selected, and they add value to the paper, then you can consider the Indian studies.

krishnaundela wrote: ↑20 Apr 2020, 17:15

BETSY BIJU wrote: ↑19 Apr 2020, 15:09 Are consents always necessary in observational, non-interventional prospective studies?

Yes. Even for observational studies like cohort, case-control or cross-sectional, we need to take consent from the participants as we are accessing their information from medical records and taking their personal history by interview. By taking the consent, we are informing the participants that the information collected is not disclosed to anyone and used only for the research purpose without revealing the personal details of participants.

@BETSY BIJU

As rightly said by Krishna Sir, consent has to be taken for all the research studies as we are collecting their information.

The misconception arises because, in an observational or non-interventional study, we are not intervening in the standard care of the subject. But the point that is to be understood is that consent is obtained not ONLY for obtaining permission to intervene. The basis of Informed consent is also to inform and take permission from a 'data subject' (research participant), that we are collecting their personal or healthcare data and the data will be stored and managed in a certain manner.

Navami kanksha wrote: ↑20 Apr 2020, 16:30 How to design a qualitative/ quantitative research question?

@Navami kanksha

Hello Navami,

In a simpler terms, Qualitative research usually generates textual data, which is non-numerical, while Quantitative research, on the contrary, produces numerical data or information that can be converted into numbers.

Qualitative research is used to gain an understanding of underlying reasons, opinions, and motivations. It provides insights into the problem or helps to develop ideas or hypotheses for potential quantitative research. Whereas, Quantitative research is used to quantify attitudes, opinions, behaviours, and other defined variables – and generalize results from a larger sample population. Quantitative data collection methods are much more structured than Qualitative data collection methods and include various forms of surveys (online surveys, paper surveys, mobile surveys, face-to-face interviews, telephone interviews, longitudinal studies, website interceptors, online polls, and systematic observations).

Ultimately, whether to pursue a qualitative or a quantitative study approach is up to you – however, be sure to base your decision on the nature of your project and the kind of information you seek in the context of your study and the resources available to you.

I hope this helps.

Galeti harshalatha wrote: ↑20 Apr 2020, 13:54 what are assessment scales for birth defects?

@Galeti harshalatha

Hello Harshalatha,

To be honest, I didn't get your question. However, I'm assuming that you wanted to know whether if there are any scales to assess birth defects. If that is your question, to the best of my knowledge there are no such scales to assess the birth defects and I don't think so there will be any scales coming soon, as they are not appropriate or feasible in order to screen or capture the defects.

Many birth defects can be diagnosed before birth with tests. For instance, chromosome problems such as Down syndrome can be diagnosed before birth by looking at cells in the amniotic fluid or from the placenta. Or they can be found by looking at the baby’s DNA in the mother’s blood (noninvasive prenatal screening). Fetal ultrasound during pregnancy can also show the possibility of certain birth defects.

After birth, most of the birth defects are identified physically or using certain outcome measures like low- & high-birth weight, red cells folate levels, gestational age at birth, etc.,

I hope this helps.

Admin wrote: ↑20 Apr 2020, 08:36 @narayana.reddy How can we filter the pharmacy related journals from Scopus Index Site?

@Admin

It is a pretty straight-forward process.

Just go the Scimago journal rankings which could be accessed here https://www.scimagojr.com/index.php, and then click on the journal rankings which is on the top left-hand side, then select Pharmacology, Toxicology, and Pharmaceutics from the drop-down menu from the 'All subject areas' and then if needed, you can select sub-specialty categories from the drop-down menu of 'All subject categories'.

Besides, you can also filter the journals based upon the countries and year in a similar fashion explained above.

Hope this helps.

T Navaswetha wrote: ↑19 Apr 2020, 17:26 What is the role of literature review in qualitative research?

@T Navaswetha

Hello Nava Swetha,

Regardless of the type of research, literature reviews:

• Provide a foundation of knowledge on the topic

• Identify areas of prior scholarship to prevent duplication and give credit to other researchers

• Identify inconstancies: gaps in research, conflicts in previous studies, open questions left from other research

• Identify need for additional research (justifying your research)

• Identify the relationship of works in context of its contribution to the topic and to other works

• Place your own research within the context of existing literature making a case for why further study is needed.

Hope this helps.

Ragahavakrishna.K.R wrote: ↑19 Apr 2020, 17:27 What kind of new or interesting topics can we add in review articles to make unique of the article?

@Ragahavakrishna.K.R

Hi Raghava Krishna,

To be honest, I didn't get your question. Whether your question is what kind of new or interesting topics should be selected as a review article or what interesting topics to be included in a review article.

Either way, in my personal opinion both are not appropriate, as authors and as well as readers can deviate from the main track by adding interesting things into your article. No doubt, including or discussing some interesting facts in scientific papers could pull the audience, however, it is not always necessary to do so.

In fact, a review article doesn't need any interesting stuff and moreover, the author's primary goal of writing is not to focus on the uniqueness by adding relevant (or irrelevant fancy information).

Rather, I would strongly suggest you to focus on the rationale, scientific rigour, significance, and the impact that your article could bring change to the current practice.

Here is a recent paper https://link.springer.com/article/10.10 ... 017-0563-4 by Rober PW et al., which talks about the purpose, process and structure of a review article, which would walk you through the steps in authoring the best review paper.

Hope this helps.