Current and emerging pharmacologic therapies for pain and challenges which still lay ahead

Efficacy and safety of bazedoxifene in postmenopausal women with osteoporosis: A systematic review and meta-analysis

INTRODUCTION

Bazedoxifene may be promising to treat osteoporosis of postmenopausal women. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to explore the efficacy and safety of bazedoxifene in postmenopausal women with osteoporosis.

METHODS

PubMed, EMbase, Web of science, EBSCO, and Cochrane library databases were systematically searched. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) assessing the effect of bazedoxifene on osteoporosis of postmenopausal women were included. Two investigators independently searched articles, extracted data, and assessed the quality of included studies. The primary outcomes were vertebral fracture and spine BMD at 3 and 7 years.

RESULTS

Four RCTs are included in the meta-analysis. Overall, compared with placebo intervention in postmenopausal women with osteoporosis, bazedoxifene intervention can significantly reduce the risk of vertebral fracture [risk risks (RRs) = 0.69; 95% confidence interval (95% CI) = 0.52-0.93; P = .01], and increase spine BMD at 3 years (Std. mean difference = 1.71; 95% CI = 1.55-1.87; P < .005) and 7 years (Std. mean difference = 8.31; 95% CI = 8.07-8.55; P < .005). Bazedoxifene intervention results in no increase in adverse events (RR = 1.00; 95% CI = 0.99-1.00; P = .34), serious adverse events (RR = 1.04; 95% CI = 0.97-1.12; P = .31), myocardial infarction (RR = 0.88; 95% CI = 0.51-1.52; P = .64), stroke (RR = 0.97; 95% CI = 0.64-1.46; P = .87), venous thromboembolic event (RR = 1.56; 95% CI = 0.92-2.64; P = .10), and breast carcinoma (RR = 1.03; 95% CI = 0.59-1.79; P = .92).

CONCLUSIONS

Compared with placebo intervention for the osteoporosis of postmenopausal women, bazedoxifene intervention is found to significantly reduce the incidence of vertebral fracture and increase spine BMD at 3 and 7 years, and results in no increase in adverse events, serious adverse events, myocardial infarction, stroke, venous thromboembolic event, and breast carcinoma.

Search strategies-identified reports on "off-label" drug use in MEDLINE

OBJECTIVE

We developed search strategies that facilitate the identification of studies on "off-label" drug use in the bibliographic database OvidSP MEDLINE.

STUDY DESIGN AND SETTING

We compiled a gold standard reference set of reports classified as relevant or not relevant to off-label drug use. We conceived search queries, including search words and word strings. We searched MEDLINE via OvidSP from 1948 to 2011. In comparison with the gold standard, we determined sensitivity and precision of search queries and their combinations. We attempted to achieve the highest possible sensitive search strategy and an optimal balance of sensitivity and precision.

RESULTS

Our gold standard set contained 4,067 relevant documents overall of 6,785 records, among those 2,177 could be retrieved from MEDLINE. The most sensitive single term was "off label∗.af." (overall sensitivity 40.9%, sensitivity within MEDLINE 76.4%, and precision 84.4%). A combination of 31 search queries had the maximum overall sensitivity of 53.3% (sensitivity within MEDLINE 99.5%) at a precision of 60.3%. A search strategy with the maximum precision (84.0%) yielded a sensitivity of 49.0% (sensitivity within MEDLINE 91.5%).

CONCLUSION

We empirically developed two versions of optimized sensitive search strategies, which can achieve reasonable performance for retrieving off-label drug use documents in OvidSP MEDLINE.