Brand generic: addressing non-adherence, secular trends and non-overlap.

Whereas generic drugs offer a cost-effective alternative to brand name drugs, regulators need a method to assess therapeutic equivalence in a post-market setting. We develop such a method in the context of assessing the therapeutic equivalence of immediate release venlafaxine, based on a large insurance claims data set provided by OptumLabs. To address this question properly, our methodology must deal with issues of non-adherence, secular trends in health outcomes and lack of treatment overlap due to sharp uptake of the generic drug once it becomes available.

Pragmatic inferences modulate N400 during sentence comprehension: evidence from picture-sentence verification.

The present study examines the online realization of pragmatic meaning using event-related potentials (ERPs). Participants read sentences including the English quantifier some, which has both a semantic meaning (at least one) and a pragmatic meaning (not all). Unlike previous ERP studies of this phenomenon, sentences in the current study were evaluated not in terms of their truth with respect to the real world, but in terms of their consistency with a picture presented before the sentence.