Population‐based patterns of prescription androgen use, 1976–2008
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: Prescription testosterone (T) has limited approved medical indications and is a controlled substance in Canada. Utilization studies in other Westernized countries have revealed sharp increases in T use in recent years. We examined medical use of androgens, including T, over a ≥30-year period among adult (18+) men in a population-based study set in a Canadian juridisdiction of universal health care. METHODS: Analyses were based on data from electronic records of dispensed prescriptions during 1976-2008 in Saskatchewan, Canada. All formulations of androgens listed in the provincial formulary (oral and injectable) were included. We examined demographics of users, androgen types used, switching patterns, and trends in the annual rate of use over time. RESULTS: There were 11 521 androgen users who were followed for an average of 11.8 years. Overall, 11 types of androgens were used, and there were 86 812 dispensing events. The mean age at first use was 56.4 years (median: 58). Men had 7.5 prescription dispensing events on average (median: 2). The most commonly used formulations were methyl-T (36.2% of users) followed by T-enanthate (32.5%), T-cypionate (22.3%), and T-undecanoate (20.0%). Most users (82%) did not switch among androgen types. The annual rate of use varied substantially over time, with a marked increase observed from 1994 to 1999 and a decrease from 2000 to 2008. CONCLUSIONS: Androgen users were largely middle aged and had relatively few dispensings. We hypothesize that observed secular trends in androgen use may align with drug treatment pattern changes for erectile dysfunction, including the advent of phosphodiesterase type 5 inhibitors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".