ReviewAmerican journal of epidemiology2024
The State of Use and Utility of Negative Controls in Pharmacoepidemiologic Studies.
Review in American journal of epidemiology, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Negative controls and how to use them: a guidance paper.International journal of epidemiology · 2026Article
- Long-Term Cardiovascular Risks of Anticholinergic Versus Non-Anticholinergic Antidepressants: A Target Trial Emulation With Negative Control Correction.Pharmacoepidemiology and drug safety · 2026Article
- How Negative Controls Are Used in Pharmacoepidemiology: A Methodological Scoping Review of Real-World Observational Studies of Glucagon-Like Peptide-1 Receptor Agonists.Pharmacoepidemiology and drug safety · 2026Article
- Acetylcholinesterase inhibitors and the risk of delirium - a Danish nationwide register-based cohort study.Alzheimer's research & therapy · 2026Article
- Temporal changes in auditory adverse event reporting in the U.S. vaccine adverse event reporting system associated with the COVID-19 vaccine rollout: an interrupted time series analysis with negative control evaluation.Frontiers in public health · 2026Article
- Continuous Glucose Monitoring in Insulin-Treated Older Adults With Diabetes and Alzheimer Disease and Related Dementias.JAMA network open · 2025Article
- A novel high dimensional approach to assess heterogeneous treatment effect in claims data.American journal of epidemiology · 2025Article
- Suicide and suicide attempt in users of GLP-1 receptor agonists: a nationwide case-time-control study.EClinicalMedicine · 2025Article
- Regression-Based Proximal Causal Inference.American journal of epidemiology · 2024Article
- Selecting the most informative positive and negative controls for self-controlled case series (SCCS): Rationale, approach, and lessons from studies investigating the safety of COVID-19 vaccines.Journal of global health · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Uses of real-world data in drug safety and effectiveness studies are often challenged by various sources of bias. We undertook a systematic search of the published literature through September 2020 to evaluate the state of use and utility of negative controls to address bias in pharmacoepidemiologic studies. Two reviewers independently evaluated study eligibility and abstracted data. Our search identified 184 eligible studies for inclusion. Cohort studies (115, 63%) and administrative data (114, 62%) were, respectively, the most common study design and data type used. Most studies used negative control outcomes (91, 50%), and for most studies the target source of bias was unmeasured confounding (93, 51%). We identified 4 utility domains of negative controls: 1) bias detection (149, 81%), 2) bias correction (16, 9%), 3) P-value calibration (8, 4%), and 4) performance assessment of different methods used in drug safety studies (31, 17%). The most popular methodologies used were the 95% confidence interval and P-value calibration. In addition, we identified 2 reference sets with structured steps to check the causality assumption of the negative control. While negative controls are powerful tools in bias detection, we found many studies lacked checking the underlying assumptions. This article is part of a Special Collection on Pharmacoepidemiology.
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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.