[Application of disease-risk score in pharmacoepidemiologic studies]

Disease risk score (DRS) can be used to adjust the confounding effects on data with high dimensions and can reduce related bias through balancing the risk or probability, regarding the development of some specific diseases, between the two compared groups. The DRS approach thus can be applied to studies of pharmacoepidemiology when administrative medical database is used for data analysis. Although DRS functions are similarly to the propensity scores (PS) under many situations, even with some advantages over PS or conventional analytical methods in some special exposure settings, the usage of DRS is far limited than the PS method. Considering the important application value of DRS in pharmacoepidemiologic studies, we are introducing the theory, model, estimation and application of DRS, to present reference for the development of DRS method in the pharmacoepidemiologic studies.