Background

Network Analysis (NA) is a method that has been used in various disciplines such as Social sciences and Ecology for decades. So far, NA has not been used extensively in studies of medication use. Only a handful of papers have used NA in Drug Prescription Networks (DPN). We provide an introduction to NA terminology alongside a guide to creating and extracting results from the medication networks.

Objective

To introduce the readers to NA as a tool to study medication use by demonstrating how to apply different NA measures on 3 generated medication networks.

Methods

We used the Norwegian Prescription Database (NorPD) to create a network that describes the co-medication in elderly persons in Norway on January 1, 2013. We used the Norwegian Electronic Prescription Support System (FEST) to create another network of severe drug-drug interactions (DDIs). Lastly, we created a network combining the two networks to show the actual use of drugs with severe DDIs. We used these networks to elucidate how to apply and interpret different network measures in medication networks.

Results

Interactive network graphs are made available online, Stata and R syntaxes are provided. Various useful network measures for medication networks were applied such as network topological features, modularity analysis and centrality measures. Edge lists data used to generate the networks are openly available for readers in an open data repository to explore and use.

Conclusion

We believe that NA can be a useful tool in medication use studies. We have provided information and hopefully inspiration for other researchers to use NA in their own projects. While network analyses are useful for exploring and discovering structures in medication use studies, it also has limitations. It can be challenging to interpret and it is not suitable for hypothesis testing.

中文翻译：

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药物使用研究的网络分析简介

背景

网络分析 (NA) 是一种在社会科学和生态学等各个学科中使用了几十年的方法。到目前为止，NA 尚未广泛用于药物使用研究。只有少数论文在药物处方网络 (DPN) 中使用了 NA。我们提供了 NA 术语的介绍以及从药物网络创建和提取结果的指南。

客观的

通过演示如何在 3 个生成的药物网络上应用不同的 NA 措施，向读者介绍 NA 作为研究药物使用的工具。

方法

我们使用挪威处方数据库 (NorPD) 创建了一个描述 2013 年 1 月 1 日挪威老年人联合用药的网络。交互（DDI）。最后，我们创建了一个结合这两个网络的网络，以显示严重 DDI 药物的实际使用情况。我们使用这些网络来阐明如何在药物网络中应用和解释不同的网络度量。

结果

在线提供交互式网络图，提供 Stata 和 R 语法。应用了各种对药物网络有用的网络度量，例如网络拓扑特征、模块化分析和中心性度量。用于生成网络的边缘列表数据在开放数据存储库中公开供读者探索和使用。

结论

我们相信 NA 可以成为药物使用研究中的有用工具。我们已经为其他研究人员在他们自己的项目中使用 NA 提供了信息并希望得到启发。虽然网络分析对于探索和发现药物使用研究中的结构很有用，但它也有局限性。解释可能具有挑战性，并且不适合进行假设检验。