ReviewPharmacoepidemiology and drug safety2024
The weighted cumulative exposure method and its application to pharmacoepidemiology: A narrative review.
Review in Pharmacoepidemiology and drug safety, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Early glycaemic exposure and cancer risk in people with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes.Diabetologia · 2026Article
- Methodological Development and Assessing Prescribing Determinants Through Cumulative Drug Exposure in Hospitalized Patients: Proof-of-Concept Retrospective Study.JMIR medical informatics · 2026Article
- Weighted Cumulative Exposure Modelling to Assess the Association Between Reproductive Factors and Future Cardiovascular Disease in Women.Paediatric and perinatal epidemiology · 2026Article
- Pharmacoepidemiology unpacked: a roadmap for junior researchers.Frontiers in pharmacology · 2026Review
- Cumulative Anticholinergic Exposure and Change in Gait Speed and Grip Strength in Older Adults.JAMA network open · 2025Article
- Second primary cancers and hormonal therapies for prostate cancer: A nested case-control study.Fundamental & clinical pharmacology · 2025Article
- Associations of cumulative voriconazole dose, treatment duration, and alkaline phosphatase with voriconazole-induced periostitis.Skeletal radiology · 2025Article
- The weighted cumulative exposure method and its application to pharmacoepidemiology: A narrative review.Pharmacoepidemiology and drug safety · 2024Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
purposeThe weighted cumulative exposure (WCE) method has been used in a number of fields including pharmacoepidemiology where it can account for intensity, duration and timing of exposures on the risk of an outcome. The method uses a data driven approach with flexible cubic B-splines to assign weights to past doses and select an aetiologically appropriate time window. Predictions of risk are possible for common exposure patterns encountered in real-world studies. The purpose of this study was to describe applications of the WCE method to pharmacoepidemiology and assess the strengths and limitations of the method.
methodA literature search was undertaken to find studies applying the WCE method to the study of medicines. Articles published in PubMed using the search term 'weighted cumulative exposure' and articles citing Sylvestre et al. (2009) in Google Scholar or Scopus up to March 2023 were subsequently reviewed. Articles were selected based on title and review of abstracts.
resultsSeventeen clinical applications using the data-driven WCE method with flexible cubic splines were identified in the review. These included 3 case-control studies and 14 cohort studies, of which 12 were analysed with Cox proportional hazards models and 2 with logistic regression. Thirteen studies used time windows of 1 year or longer. Of 11 studies which compared conventional models with the WCE method, 10 (91%) studies found a better fit with WCE models while one had an equivalent fit. The freely available 'WCE' software package has facilitated the applications of the WCE method with flexible cubic splines.
conclusionsThe WCE method allows additional insights into the effect of cumulative exposure on outcomes, including the timing and intensity (dose) of the exposure on the risk. The flexibility of the method is particularly well suited to studies with long-term exposures that vary over time or where the current risk of an event is affected by how far the exposure is in the past, which is difficult to model with conventional definitions of exposure. Interpretation of the results can be more complex than for conventional models and would be facilitated by a standardised reporting framework.
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What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.