ArticleClinical epidemiology2026
Stable Overall Volume, Shifting Structure: Nine Years of Paediatric Outpatient Prescribing and Dispensing in Finland, 2017-2025.
Article in Clinical epidemiology, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Background: Paediatric outpatient prescribing varies across Europe, and whole-population data spanning the COVID-19 pandemic remain scarce. We characterised trends in dispensation prevalence, age and sex patterns, therapeutic class shifts, and prescriber channels for all children in Finland, 2017-2025. Methods: We conducted a nationwide registry-based drug utilisation study of all children under 18 years resident in Finland in 2017-2025, using individual-level data from the Kanta Prescription Centre. Drugs were classified by ATC code. Annual prevalence was the proportion of the year-end resident child population with at least one dispensation; age and sex patterns were modelled with sex-specific quasi-Poisson generalised additive models. Results: Over 2017-2025, 1,324,517 children received 21.1 million dispensations. Mean annual dispensation prevalence was 50.4%, or 45.1% when systemic antibiotics were excluded. Anti-infective dispensing (ATC J) fell from 298 to 237 per 1,000 children and did not return to pre-pandemic levels. Nervous system drug prevalence (ATC N) rose from 107 to 155 per 1,000, driven mainly by adolescents (lisdexamfetamine +709%, sertraline +305%, methylphenidate +207%). Boys predominated to age 13 (boy-to-girl ratio peaking near 1.5); by age 17, girls received roughly 1.7 times as many dispensations as boys. The adolescent gap persisted after excluding hormonal contraceptives, and boys showed the larger relative rise at ages 14-17. The public-sector share of prescriptions fell from 62.1% to 57.9%, with prescribing to children under 6 years shifting from public general practice to private paediatrics. Conclusion: Overall paediatric dispensation volume in Finland was broadly stable across 2017-2025, but the underlying structure changed substantially. Antibiotic stewardship gains held, central nervous system medicine use rose continuously, and the channel mix shifted toward private paediatric care for younger children. If access to private care depends on family resources, this shift may widen inequalities in children's access to prescribed medicines, although socioeconomic factors were not assessed here.
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.