Pharmacoepidemiology. Past, Present and Future.  ―From Big Data to Knowledge―

Abstract

Epidemiological methods have been applied to investigate drug problems such as past drug disasters, and the academic field called pharmacoepidemiology was created. The first international conference of pharmacoepidemiology was held in 1985, and the first Japanese conference was in 1995. Therefore it is the relatively new field. Recently, pharmacoepidemiology has gained a lot of attention because of US sentinel initiative, recommendations by the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare in Japan, and revision of GPSP for analyzing medical databases with epidemiological methods. In the future of pharmacoepidemiology, it is expected that the quality and quantity improvements of medical databases, and signal detection based on IoX and AI innovation. In addition, genomic data will be also more available and pharmacoepidemiology gets much closer to genomic epidemiology. It would be also possible to linkage between clinical data and patient registries, and improve analytical methods. Also, I would like to hope that pharmacoepidemiology gets more attention due to not merely big data, but creating knowledge on the safety of medicines.