BACKGROUND: Contrary to most European guidelines, benzodiazepine receptor agonists (BZRA) are often used continuously at a low dosage, being the most common form of long-term use. In Belgium, BZRA use is monitored by analyzing self-report data ...
BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 outbreak had an important impact on general practice, for example the lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) and the switch to telephone consultations. We installed a monitoring instrument and reported the burden t...
BACKGROUND: To improve the management of childhood urinary tract infections, it is essential to understand the incidence rates, testing and treatment strategy. METHODS: A retrospective study using data from 45 to 104 general practices (2000 to ...
BACKGROUND: Depression is a common mental disorder in family practice with an impact on global health. The aim of this study is to provide insight in the trends of epidemiological measures as well as pharmacological treatments and comorbidities...
OBJECTIVES: With the ageing of our population, it seems plausible that the prevalence of both dementia and multimorbidity will increase in the following decades. The aim of this study is to examine the trends in prevalence and incidence of regi...
INTRODUCTION: The Covid-19 pandemic had a tremendous impact on healthcare but uncertainty remains about the extent to which primary care provision was affected. Therefore, this paper aims to assess the impact on primary care provision and the e...
OBJECTIVES: We estimated the effect of pneumococcal vaccination (PV) on acute lower respiratory tract infections (LRTIs) in various age and risk groups using different methods within a causal inference methodological framework. STUDY DESIGN AND...
BACKGROUND: The use of Electronic Health Records (EHR) data in clinical research is incredibly increasing, but the abundancy of data resources raises the challenge of data cleaning. It can save time if the data cleaning can be done automaticall...
AIMS: This study aims to assess the prevalence of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD), heart failure (HF), chronic kidney disease (CKD), and their combined presence in type 2 diabetes (T2D) patients in primary care for whom the 2019 ...
BACKGROUND: The electronic health record (EHR) of the general physician (GP) is an important tool that can be used to assess and improve the quality of healthcare. However, there are some problems when (re) using the data gathered in the EHR fo...
AIMS: We aimed to assess the prevalence, components and evolution of polypharmacy and to evaluate risk factors associated with polypharmacy. METHODS: A retrospective dynamic cohort study was performed, using a primary healthcare database compri...
BACKGROUND: In case-control studies most algorithms allow the controls to be sampled several times, which is not always optimal. If many controls are available and adjustment for several covariates is necessary, matching without replacement mig...
OBJECTIVES: To examine the association between the use of oral antibiotics and subsequent colorectal cancer risk. DESIGN: Matched case-control study. SETTING: General practice centres participating in the Integrated Computerised Network databas...
BACKGROUND: Estimates on the incidence rates of infections are needed to assess the burden of disease in the community. OBJECTIVE: To assess incidence rates of potentially serious infections in patients aged 65 years and over presenting to Flem...
OBJECTIVES: Rheumatoid arthritis (RA), psoriatic arthritis (PsA) and spondyloarthritis (SpA) are chronic inflammatory rheumatic conditions with high levels of comorbidity requiring additional therapeutic attention. We aimed to compare the 3-yea...
BACKGROUND: Effective clinical decision support systems require accurate translation of practice recommendations into machine-readable artifacts; developing code sets that represent clinical concepts are an important step in this process. Many ...
Pneumococcal vaccination coverage of adults at risk for pneumococcal disease is below recommended levels. There is no observational data on pneumococcal vaccination and the incidence of lower respiratory tract infections in a general adult popu...
PURPOSE: The aim of this systematic review was (i) to assess whether electronic audit and feedback (A&F) is effective in primary care and (ii) to evaluate important features concerning content and delivery of the feedback in primary care, inclu...
OBJECTIVES: The present study investigated (1) trends in the prevalence and incidence of knee osteoarthritis over a 20-year period (1996-2015); (2) trends in multimorbidity and (3) trends in drug prescriptions. DESIGN: Registry-based study. SET...
OBJECTIVES: The aim of this paper was to describe the time trends in the prevalence of multimorbidity and polypharmacy in Flanders (Belgium) between 2000 and 2015, while controlling for age and sex. METHODS: Data were available from Intego, a F...
OBJECTIVES: To assess the prevalence and incidence of heart failure (HF) stages A to C/D and their evolution over a 16-year period. Additionally, trends in comorbidities and cardiovascular (CV) treatment in patients with HF were studied in the ...
OBJECTIVES: Chronic infections with hepatitis B virus (HBV) and hepatitis C virus (HCV) have a major impact on mortality worldwide. Although effective treatments are available for both HBV and HCV infection, < /50% of the patients are even d...
Acute gastroenteritis (AGE) remains a common condition in both low- and high-income countries. In Belgium, however, there is currently a lack of information on the societal health and economic impact of AGE. We conducted a retrospective study u...
BACKGROUND: The current study evaluated time trends of statin use and incidence of recurrent CVD in secondary prevention from 1999 to 2013 and investigated which factors were associated with statin use in secondary prevention. METHODS: Intego i...
