Publications by authors named "Fangyun Wu"

Introduction: Malignant pleural effusion (MPE) is common in advanced malignancy. Data are needed on healthcare utilization and costs.

Methods: This population-based retrospective cohort study included patients aged ≥18 years with an MPE diagnosed between January 1, 2004, and December 31, 2018.

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Introduction: As the drug toxicity crisis continues to evolve globally, harms related to non-opioid substances, including stimulants, have risen in parallel. Our study aims were to describe trends in accidental stimulant toxicity deaths and to characterize demographic characteristics of decedents and the circumstances surrounding death.

Methods: We conducted a population-based repeated cross-sectional study, of all accidental stimulant toxicity deaths between January 1, 2018, and December 31, 2021, in Ontario, Canada.

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Article Synopsis
  • Serious cutaneous adverse drug reactions (cADRs) can be life-threatening and are often caused by antibiotic use, yet there hasn't been a study comparing the risk levels across different antibiotic classes.
  • This study analyzed the risks of serious cADRs in older adults in Ontario, Canada, using a case-control design with data collected over 20 years.
  • Results indicated that sulfonamides and cephalosporins had the highest associations with serious cADRs when compared to macrolides, highlighting a significant risk in specific antibiotic classes for older patients.
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Objective: The aim of our study was to compare dispensation of rheumatic medications between older male and female patients with early rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and psoriatic arthritis (PsA).

Methods: This retrospective cohort study was performed using health administrative data from Ontario, Canada (years 2010-2017), on patients with incident RA and PsA, who were aged ≥ 66 years at the time of diagnosis. Yearly dispensation of rheumatic drugs was compared between older male and female patients for 3 years after diagnosis using multivariable regression models, after adjusting for confounders.

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Purpose: To characterize opioid toxicity deaths among adolescents and young adults in Ontario, Canada, prior to and during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods: We conducted a descriptive, cross-sectional study of opioid toxicity deaths among individuals aged 15-24 in Ontario in the year prior to (March 17, 2019, to March 16, 2020) and the first year of the pandemic (March 17, 2020, to March 16, 2021) using administrative health databases. We analyzed circumstances surrounding death, substances contributing to death, and health-care encounters prior to death.

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Purpose: Few studies have examined how the absolute risk of thromboembolism with COVID-19 has evolved over time across different countries. Researchers from the European Medicines Agency, Health Canada, and the United States (US) Food and Drug Administration established a collaboration to evaluate the absolute risk of arterial (ATE) and venous thromboembolism (VTE) in the 90 days after diagnosis of COVID-19 in the ambulatory (eg, outpatient, emergency department, nursing facility) setting from seven countries across North America (Canada, US) and Europe (England, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, and Spain) within periods before and during COVID-19 vaccine availability.

Patients And Methods: We conducted cohort studies of patients initially diagnosed with COVID-19 in the ambulatory setting from the seven specified countries.

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Importance: Breast, cervical, and colorectal cancer-screening disparities existed prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, and it is unclear whether those have changed since the pandemic.

Objective: To assess whether changes in screening from before the pandemic to after the pandemic varied for immigrants and for people with limited income.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This population-based, cross-sectional study, using data from March 31, 2019, and March 31, 2022, included adults in Ontario, Canada, the country's most populous province, with more than 14 million people, almost 30% of whom are immigrants.

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Background: Accurate coding of diagnoses of SARS-CoV-2 infection in administrative data benefits population-based studies about the epidemiology, treatment and outcomes of COVID-19. We describe the validity of diagnoses of SARS-CoV-2 infection recorded in hospital discharge abstracts, emergency department records and outpatient physician service claims from 3 Canadian provinces.

Methods: In this cohort study, population-based inpatient, emergency department and outpatient records were linked to SARS-CoV-2 polymerase chain reaction (PCR; reference standard) test results from British Columbia, Manitoba and Ontario for Apr.

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  • Eliminating out-of-pocket costs for medications may significantly reduce total health care spending, especially for patients with financial barriers to adherence.
  • A study conducted in Ontario involved 747 adults who had previously struggled to afford their medications, tracking their health care costs over three years.
  • The results showed that those who received free medications had lower median health care costs of $1,641, indicating that addressing medication affordability can lead to overall savings in health care expenses.
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Background: The global burden of Parkinson's disease (PD) has more than doubled over the past three decades, and this trend is expected to continue. Despite generally poorer access to health care services in rural areas, little previous work has examined health system use in persons with PD by rurality. We examined trends in the prevalence of PD and health service use among persons with PD by rurality in Ontario, Canada.

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Importance: The COVID-19 pandemic has played a role in increased use of virtual care in primary care. However, few studies have examined the association between virtual primary care visits and other health care use.

Objective: To evaluate the association between the percentage of virtual visits in primary care and the rate of emergency department (ED) visits.

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Objective: Car dependency contributes to physical inactivity and, consequently, may increase the likelihood of diabetes. We investigated whether neighborhoods that are highly conducive to driving confer a greater risk of developing diabetes and, if so, whether this differs by age.

Research Design And Methods: We used administrative health care data to identify all working-age Canadian adults (20-64 years) who were living in Toronto on 1 April 2011 without diabetes (type 1 or 2).

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Objective: To compare patterns in use of different antiemetics during pregnancy in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, between 2002 and 2014.

Methods: We constructed population-based cohorts of pregnant women using administrative healthcare data from five Canadian provinces (Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, and Saskatchewan), the Clinical Practice Research Datalink from the United Kingdom, and the IBM MarketScan Research Databases from the United States. We included pregnancies ending in live births, stillbirth, spontaneous abortion, or induced abortion.

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We conducted 2 analyses using administrative data to understand whether more family physicians in Ontario, Canada stopped working during the COVID-19 pandemic compared with previous years. First, we found 3.1% of physicians working in 2019 (n = 385/12,247) reported no billings in the first 6 months of the pandemic; compared with other family physicians, a higher portion were aged 75 years or older (13.

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The exploration of biodegradable polymers with shape memory effects (SMEs) holds great promise in biomedical fields. Revealing the relationship between the SMEs and polymer structures not only contributes to interpreting the SME mechanisms, but also prompts the customization of materials properties for specific requirements. Herein, we developed a series of poly(ester urea) (PEU) random copolymers composed of two different diamine monomers based on L-alanine and L-valine, respectively.

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Background: No Canadian studies examined the economic impact of hepatitis B virus (HBV) using population-based, patient-level data. We determined attributable costs associated with HBV from a health care payer perspective.

Methods: We conducted an incidence-based, matched cohort, cost-of-illness study.

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Objectives: Our aim was to compare patterns of musculoskeletal-related healthcare utilisation between male and female patients before and after the diagnosis of inflammatory arthritis (IA).

Methods: We used Ontario administrative health data to create three inception cohorts of adult patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), ankylosing spondylitis (AS) and psoriatic arthritis (PsA) diagnosed between April 2010 and March 2017. Healthcare utilisation indicators including visits to physicians, and use of musculoskeletal imaging and laboratory tests were assessed in each year for 3 years before and after diagnosis and compared between male and female patients using regression models adjusting for sociodemographic factors and comorbidities.

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Palliative care focuses on improving quality of life for patients with life-limiting conditions. Although previous studies have shown palliative care to be associated with reduced acute healthcare use in people with cancer and other illnesses, these findings may not generalize to patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). We examined the association between palliative care and rates of days at home, locations of death, and acute healthcare use in patients with COPD.

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Importance: Ondansetron is frequently used to treat nausea and vomiting during pregnancy. Although some studies reported important safety signals, few studies have been sufficiently large to assess rare pregnancy outcomes.

Objective: To study the association between ondansetron exposure during pregnancy and the risks of spontaneous abortion, stillbirth, and major congenital malformations.

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Background: Globally, primary care changed dramatically as a result of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. We aimed to understand the degree to which office and virtual primary care changed, and for which patients and physicians, during the initial months of the pandemic in Ontario, Canada.

Methods: This population-based study compared comprehensive, linked primary care physician billing data from Jan.

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Background: The intent of the Canadian Alliance for Healthy Hearts and Minds (CAHHM) cohort is to understand the early determinants of subclinical cardiac and vascular disease and progression in adults selected from existing cohorts-the Canadian Partnership for Tomorrow's Health, the Prospective Urban and Rural Evaluation (PURE) cohort, and the Montreal Heart Institute Biobank. We evaluated how well the CAHHM-Health Services Research (CAHHM-HSR) subcohort reflects the Canadian population.

Methods: A cross-sectional design was used among a prospective cohort of community-dwelling adults aged 35-69 years who met the CAHHM inclusion criteria, and a cohort of adults aged 35-69 years who responded to the 2015 Canadian Community Health Survey-Rapid Response module.

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Objective: To examine whether neighborhood socioeconomic status (SES) is a predictor of non-drug-related health care costs among Canadian adults with diabetes and, if so, whether SES disparities in costs are reduced after age 65 years, when universal drug coverage commences as an insurable benefit.

Research Design And Methods: Administrative health databases were used to examine publicly funded health care expenditures among 698,113 younger (20-64 years) and older (≥65 years) adults with diabetes in Ontario from April 2004 to March 2014. Generalized linear models were constructed to examine relative and absolute differences in health care costs (total and non-drug-related costs) across neighborhood SES quintiles, by age, with adjustment for differences in age, sex, diabetes duration, and comorbidity.

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Article Synopsis
  • Administrative healthcare databases are increasingly used for research, but they often lack important confounding variables that can affect treatment outcomes.
  • The high-dimensional propensity score (hdPS) algorithm helps generate proxies for these unmeasured confounders by creating a large number of empirically-derived covariates from administrative databases.
  • A study compared three types of propensity scores in patients with acute myocardial infarction (AMI) and congestive heart failure (CHF), finding that while the hdPS sometimes provided useful estimates, it could still leave important confounders unaccounted for compared to scores derived from detailed clinical data.
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Purpose: To validate three approaches for identifying incident cases of pancreatic cancer in Ontario administrative claims data.

Methods: We created a cohort using Ontario (Canada) administrative health data from 2002 to 2012 and identified cases of pancreatic cancer with three approaches, using the Ontario Cancer Registry (OCR) as the reference standard. In the any diagnosis approach, cases were defined by primary or secondary diagnostic codes for pancreatic cancer in outpatient or inpatient records.

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Transitions of care leave patients vulnerable to the unintentional discontinuation of medications with proven efficacy for treating chronic diseases. Older adults residing in nursing homes may be especially susceptible to this preventable adverse event. The effect of large-scale policy changes on improving this practice is unknown.

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