Clinical Outcomes of Plavix and Generic Clopidogrel for Patients Hospitalized With an Acute Coronary Syndrome
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Clopidogrel is one of the most commonly prescribed medications because of its ability to improve clinical outcomes for a broad range of cardiovascular conditions. After patent protection expired for Plavix in 2012, many healthcare systems adopted generic clopidogrel as a strategy to reduce healthcare costs. Methods and Results: We conducted a population-based observational study to determine whether generic clopidogrel was noninferior to Plavix. Patients who were hospitalized with an acute coronary syndrome (ACS) from 2009 to 2014 in Ontario, Canada, >65 years, survived ≥7 days after discharge, were eligible for inclusion. The primary outcome was a composite of death and recurrent ACS at 1 year. The noninferiority margin was prespecified at a relative hazard difference of 10%. Inverse propensity of treatment weighting of the propensity score was used to account for differences in baseline characteristics between the treatment groups. The effect of clopidogrel on the hazard of clinical outcomes was estimated using a Cox proportional hazards model within the propensity-weighted cohort using Plavix as a reference. Our study included 24 530 patients with ACS, 12 643 were prescribed Plavix and 11 887 were prescribed generic clopidogrel at hospital discharge. The mean age was 77 years, 57% were men, and 21% had an ST-segment–elevation myocardial infarction. At 1 year, 17.6% of patients prescribed Plavix and 17.9% of patients prescribed clopidogrel experienced the primary outcome (hazard ratio, 1.02; 95% confidence interval, 0.96–1.08; P =0.005 for noninferiority). No significant differences between rates of death, all-cause readmission, ACS, stroke or transient ischemic attack, or bleeding were observed. Conclusions: Generic clopidogrel was noninferior to Plavix with respect to the composite end point of death and recurrent hospitalization for ACS at 1 year among adults >65 years after an ACS hospitalization. Our findings support generic clopidogrel in ACS, which could lead to substantial healthcare cost savings.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".