Crestor, an important but controversial cholesterol-lowering drug, is contraindicated for use by senior and Asian patients. In this paper, we exploit this fact along with unique physician-level prescription and detailing data for statin drugs to examine the hypothesis that detailing is informative. Our tests are based on a simple model in which detailing impacts physicians’ expected match utility of Crestor for different types of patients. We find strong evidence for the informative-detailing hypothesis: relative to the other patients, detailing significantly reduces physicians’ likelihood of prescribing Crestor to contraindicated patients. Our results are robust to detailing being correlated with physician-specific unobserved factors and/or differential trends in individual physicians’ attitudes toward Crestor.

中文翻译：

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药品详细说明是否有用？禁忌药物处方的证据

Crestor是一种重要的但有争议的降胆固醇药物，禁忌用于老年和亚洲患者。在本文中，我们利用这一事实以及独特的医师级别处方和他汀类药物的详细数据来检验这种详细说明具有指导意义的假设。我们的测试基于一个简单的模型，其中的详细信息会影响医生对于不同类型患者的Crestor预期匹配效用。我们为有详细信息的假设找到了有力的证据：相对于其他患者，详细说明大大降低了医生向禁忌症患者开处方Crestor的可能性。我们的结果对于详细说明与特定于医生的未观察因素和/或各个医生对Crestor的态度的差异趋势相关的结果是可靠的。