Employing Longitudinal Trajectories to Model Exposure in Perinatal Pharmacoepidemiology Research

Studies of the safety of medication use during pregnancy typically classify exposures in a dichotomous manner (e.g., any use in pregnancy or by trimester) or by simple categories of dose (e.g., high vs low daily dose) or duration of use (e.g., many vs few days). However, recent studies have used clustering methods to summarize complex patterns of individuals’ medication use during pregnancy. This presentation will highlight studies using longitudinal trajectory clustering methods to model medication exposure during pregnancy (i.e., oral corticosteroids, antidepressants) and will provide a review of standard statistical packages available, strengths, limitations, and future directions of the approach.