Patterns of amlodipine and felodipine use in an elderly Quebec population.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: To assess drug prescription patterns and medical resource consumption in an elderly population in Quebec receiving amlodipine or felodipine for the treatment of hypertension. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Sociodemographic, clinical and drug claim data for a random sample of hypertensive patients 65 years of age and older with at least one claim for amlodipine or felodipine between August 1, 1990 and August 31, 1997 were extracted from the Régie de l'assurance maladie du Québec (RAMQ) database. Patterns of prescription renewal, drug switch and compliance rates, and health care resource use were established for both an amlodipine and a felodipine group. Long term persistence on treatment was quantified by survival curve analysis. RESULTS: The amlodipine (5188 patients) and felodipine (2630 patients) groups were similar in terms of sex ratio (66.7% female) and age (mean 74 years). Average compliance rates for amlodipine patients (67.9%) were significantly higher than for felodipine patients (66.2%) (P<0.01), and switch rates were 5.4-fold higher in the latter group. Patients initiating treatment with felodipine had a 27% increased rate of discontinuation (relative risk 1.27) compared with the amlodipine patients. In addition, patients with at least one year of follow-up data were more likely to maintain amlodipine as part of their antihypertensive regimens than felodipine. After adjustment, medical resource consumption patterns were similar for both groups except for an increase in the number of specialist visits for the amlodipine treatment group. CONCLUSIONS: Patients who received amlodipine, either as a monotherapy or as part of a multitherapy regimen, were more compliant and persistent with their treatment than patients on felodipine. The data suggest that amlodipine may provide more effective long term hypertension control than felodipine, and that the two drugs are not therapeutically equivalent.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".