Less creepy than it sounds
News.com.au has the headline New report from Westpac reveals ‘turbocharged’ spending and increased dependence on antidepressant drug, and follows it up with “A new report looking at Australia’s spending on health services shows one drug entered the ‘Top 10’ list of prescription medicines for the first time in 14 years.” The article then goes on about using Westpac card data and a survey of pharmacies. I saw this on Twitter, where someone was outraged that Westpac was using individual drug purchase data this way. They’re not.
There’s literally nothing in the article, or the press release it’s based on, or the report that’s based on to support “increased dependence on antidepressant drug”, and not much to support increased use. The information on sertraline prescriptions didn’t come from the Westpac survey. The news about sertraline entering the top ten prescribed medicines is from the Pharmaceutical Benefit Scheme (Australia’s version of Pharmac), who (like Pharmac) release this sort of data every year. In the year 2019-2020, sertraline was one of the top ten; it hadn’t been in previous years. This isn’t a new report; it came out in late 2020 and we already have the data for 2020-21. Moving into the top ten doesn’t necessarily imply higher use, and we can’t tell from these data whether the prescriptions for antidepressants in general increased or whether the relative use of different antidepressants changed.
The actual Westpac survey information is probably interesting if you run a pharmacy in Australia, but it doesn’t have much headline potential.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »