ReviewPharmacoepidemiology and drug safety2021
Core concepts in pharmacoepidemiology: Violations of the positivity assumption in the causal analysis of observational data: Consequences and statistical approaches.
Review in Pharmacoepidemiology and drug safety, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 44 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
44 citing papers in PubMed, 73 citations in OpenAlex.
- Continuous Glucose Monitoring and Long-Term Glycemic and Kidney Outcomes.JAMA network open · 2026Article
- Tramadol Co-Administration with Oxycodone or Hydrocodone Increases Opioid Burden without Improving Postoperative Pain Control.Clinical pharmacology and therapeutics · 2026Article
- Core Concepts in Pharmacoepidemiology-Round 3: Call for Writing Groups.Pharmacoepidemiology and drug safety · 2026Article
- Cardiovascular outcomes and safety associated with statin therapy for primary prevention in older adults with type 2 diabetes: A target trial emulation study.PLoS medicine · 2026Article
- Studying When to Add Biological Therapy to Cytotoxic Therapy in Advanced Cancer Care Using Real World Data: How to Avoid Design Choices That Generate Immortal Time.Cancer medicine · 2026Article
- One- and Two-Year Outcomes of Switching to a Dolutegravir-Based ART Regimen: An Observational Emulation of Sequential Target Trials.Open forum infectious diseases · 2026Article
- An operational target trial emulation framework for causal inference using electronic health record data.NPJ digital medicine · 2026Review
- Should We Extend the Use of Oral Antibiotics in Infective Endocarditis? The ENDO-ORAL Study.Clinical infectious diseases : an official publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America · 2026Article
- Network-based prediction and real-world patient data observation identify doxycycline as a repurposable drug in Alzheimer's disease.Neurotherapeutics : the journal of the American Society for Experimental NeuroTherapeutics · 2026Article
- Climate resilience adaptation and psychiatric emergency services utilization during extreme heat in Boston, MA: a difference-in-differences analysis.Environment international · 2026Article
- Impact of Near-Positivity Violations on IPTW-Estimated Marginal Structural Survival Models With Time-Dependent Confounding.Biometrical journal. Biometrische Zeitschrift · 2025Article
- Is Checking for Sequential Positivity Violations Getting You Down? Try sPoRT!Epidemiology (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Individualized prescriptive inference in ischaemic stroke.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Comparative Safety of Glucagon-Like Peptide 1 Receptor Agonists (GLP-1-RAs) in Type 2 Diabetes and Chronic Weight Management: A Real-World Data Study.Pharmacoepidemiology and drug safety · 2025Article
- High-Dimensional Disease Risk Score for Dealing With Residual Confounding Bias in Estimating Treatment Effects With a Survival Outcome.Pharmacoepidemiology and drug safety · 2025Article
- A Simple Diagnostic for the Positivity Assumption for Continuous Exposures.Statistics in medicine · 2025Article
- Sodium bicarbonate administration for metabolic acidosis in the intensive care unit: a target trial emulation.Intensive care medicine · 2025Article
- Comment on "Association of polypharmacy with clinical outcomes and healthcare utilization in older adults with cardiometabolic diseases: a retrospective cohort study".International journal of clinical pharmacy · 2025Article
- Observational
- Cardiovascular Hazards of Abacavir- Versus Tenofovir-Containing Antiretroviral Therapies: Insights From an Analysis of the REPRIEVE Trial Cohort.Open forum infectious diseases · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
In the causal analysis of observational data, the positivity assumption requires that all treatments of interest be observed in every patient subgroup. Violations of this assumption are indicated by nonoverlap in the data in the sense that patients with certain covariate combinations are not observed to receive a treatment of interest, which may arise from contraindications to treatment or small sample size. In this paper, we emphasize the importance and implications of this often-overlooked assumption. Further, we elaborate on the challenges nonoverlap poses to estimation and inference and discuss previously proposed methods. We distinguish between structural and practical violations and provide insight into which methods are appropriate for each. To demonstrate alternative approaches and relevant considerations (including how overlap is defined and the target population to which results may be generalized) when addressing positivity violations, we employ an electronic health record-derived data set to assess the effects of metformin on colon cancer recurrence among diabetic patients.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion 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 OpenQuestion graph.