Feedback from Yiting Wang, a colleague at Janssen who has previous publications on the effects of bisphosphonates:
The protocol is very concise, still better to call out a couple specifics such as
Comparative effectiveness study in postmenopausal women (reflected in the cohort creation algorithm but not updated in the protocol, e.g., “gender” on page 6 of the 26-page PDF initially made me wonder if men were included)
“The target cohort and comparator cohorts will be stratified into 5 quantiles” (quintiles?) of the propensity score distribution (after trimming off the top and bottom 10% from the preference score distribution?)
• The extra 4-year age band of 46-49 (assuming standard 5-y age bands of 50-54, 55-59, …) likely contribute negligible number of hip fracture cases, while raising doubts on post-menopausal status, and whether hip fracture was osteoporotic or high-impact. Why not use age 50 and above? After all, osteoporotic hip fracture cases typically are ~70+ years old, and menopause typically occurs at age ~48-55.
• What is the rationale for requiring index date before 2012-02-01? How far before 2012-02-01? This does not seem to be related with proton pump inhibitors going OTC in the US, or osteonecrosis of the jaw being given an ICD-9 code.
• “Patients were excluded from consideration is (if) they qualified for both the target cohort and comparator cohort at any time in their record”. Does this exclusion criterion apply to post-index period, i.e., decision in the past based on info from the future?
• Hip fracture outcome restricted to inpatient diagnosis as either primary or sensitivity analysis?
• Non-hip, non-vert fractures that are more likely related to osteoporosis rather than accident for example, commonly include the following sites: rib, clavicle, humerus, radius/ulna, wrist, pelvis, or tibia/fibula. Fractures in fingers and toes may be included in sensitivity analysis.
• Vertebral compression fracture (VCF) outcome has to be interpreted with caution due to misclassification. E.g., Curtis (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=19106733 ) found that more than half of incident VCFs were misclassified based a VCF diagnosis on any claim.