Pharmacoepidemiology: how to assess medicines in real-life setting?

Pharmacoepidemiology : how to assess use and effects of medicines in real-life setting ? Pharmacoepidemiology is a recently developed field of pharmacology defined as « the study of drug uses, benefits, and adverse effects in population, with the aim of improving public health ». In drugs post-marketing assessment, its objectives are to study drugs real patterns of use, and to identify and quantify the risks associated to their use and the benefit they provide in settings that hugely differ from those of clinical trials. The methods employed are mostly common with that used in classical epidemiology, even specific biases led to the development of particular techniques. If pharmacoepidemiology has been strongly developed and sustained over the past decades in Anglo- Saxon and Northern Europe countries, its concrete emergence is much more recent in France. Indeed, it is only in the past years that it was effectively integrated to French post-marketing drug monitoring and promoted as a research field, essentially under the impetus of the French drug agency.