Adverse Cardiac Events in Older Patients Receiving Venlafaxine
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Venlafaxine is a commonly prescribed antidepressant, but whether its noradrenergic effects impart increased cardiovascular risk is unknown. We sought to examine the cardiac safety of venlafaxine relative to sertraline in older patients. METHOD: We conducted a population-based retrospective cohort study using administrative health care databases in Ontario, Canada. We included all patients aged 66 years or older who commenced treatment with either venlafaxine or sertraline between April 1, 2000, and March 31, 2009. We used inverse probability of treatment weighting with the propensity score to account for observed systematic differences in baseline characteristics between the 2 treatment groups. The primary outcome was a composite of death or hospitalization for acute myocardial infarction or congestive heart failure (as defined by codes from the International Classification of Diseases, Ninth and Tenth Revisions) within the first year of therapy. In secondary analyses, each outcome was examined separately. RESULTS: We studied 48,876 patients initiated on venlafaxine and 41,238 patients initiated on sertraline. Of these, 3,966 (8.1%) and 3,707 (9.0%) experienced the primary outcome, respectively. We found no significant difference in the risk of adverse cardiac events with venlafaxine relative to sertraline (hazard ratio = 0.97; 95% CI, 0.93-1.02). Secondary analyses revealed no differences in the risk of death or acute myocardial infarction between the 2 drugs, but the risk of heart failure was unexpectedly lower among patients treated with venlafaxine (hazard ratio = 0.87; 95% CI, 0.80-0.95). We found consistent results after stratification according to preexisting cardiovascular disease. CONCLUSIONS: As compared with sertraline, low to moderate dose venlafaxine is not associated with an increased risk of adverse cardiac events in older patients. The lower risk of heart failure among venlafaxine patients warrants further study.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 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".