Research themes

9 papers · 2013–2023 · 11countries

The methodological scaffolding every AsPEN study sits on — PSSA, SCCS, target-trial emulation, common data models, and the NeuroGEN platform that now spans 15 databases on four continents.

6 papers · 2018–2025 · 20countries

Medication safety in older and vulnerable populations. The 2021 BMJ self-controlled case series on antipsychotics, cholinesterase inhibitors, and the risk of falls and fractures typifies AsPEN's approach in this area — anchored by the 2013 PSSA on antipsychotics and acute hyperglycaemia, the thread now spans dementia survival trajectories, ADHD / methylphenidate utilisation, and post-COVID neuropsychiatric sequelae.

5 papers · 2018–2026 · 13countries

Real-world safety and utilisation of diabetes drugs in Asian populations — from the second PSSA on thiazolidinediones through current GLP-1 and 5α-reductase × T2DM studies where the underlying epidemiology often differs from Western trial cohorts.

3 papers · 2024–2025 · 16countries

Drug safety in populations that are chronically under-represented in trials. The 2024 Nature Medicine study of 3.6 million mother–child pairs across AsPEN sites is the clearest demonstration to date of what multi-country observational data can do for this question.

2 papers · 2016–2018 · 8countries

Comparative drug utilisation across health systems with very different prescribing cultures — opioids, gabapentinoids, NSAIDs, and the downstream gastrointestinal effects (PPIs, C. difficile) that follow.

3 papers · 2021–2022 · 6countries

Long-tail safety questions in cancer and endocrine therapy where AsPEN's claims data captures real-world prescribing patterns that single-trial datasets miss — androgen deprivation, biologics, GLP-1–thyroid associations, and bone-targeting agents.

3 papers · 2021–2023 · 17countries

Polypharmacy, falls, and hip fracture — questions where Asian healthcare systems with universal coverage offer some of the cleanest population-level evidence anywhere.

2 papers · 2015–2021 · 6countries

Cardiovascular safety as a downstream outcome — heart failure, myocardial infarction, and broader cardiometabolic risk associated with psychotropics, ADHD medications, and antidiabetic drugs studied across AsPEN sites.

3 papers · 2021–2025 · 11countries

AsPEN's pandemic work — vaccine-safety surveillance across 19 Asia-Pacific countries (2021), multi-organ COVID-19 outcomes, and post-acute sequelae studies that needed multi-country denominators to be statistically tractable.

7 papers · 2021–2025 · 20countries

International prescribing-trend comparisons — opioids, gabapentinoids, antipsychotics, dementia medications, antiseizure drugs, antidiabetics and ADHD medications across 60+ countries and regions, often co-led with the WHO Collaborating Centre framework.