Swedish national trends of antidepressants, antipsychotics, anxiolytics, and sedatives utilization in women
By: Elena Dudukina
Tags: Rstats, R, Data, Tidyverse, Dataviz

Swedish national trends of antidepressants, antipsychotics, anxiolytics, and sedatives utilization in women

Nordic open-access databases

Nordic countries have databases with national aggregated data on, e.g. drug utilization, openly available. These databases are a great asset — you can investigate national trends for your curiosity or research.

The databases are easily accessible and well-maintained. In this blog post, I will be taking a look at the Swedish aggregated drug utilization database.

Why I wrote this post?

The databases have a lot of useful features incorporated in a web interface, however, it is not always sufficiently flexible to satisfy certain research tasks (in my personal experience). Ticking boxes of a web app is fun but — oh no — I selected one age category more than I intended, start again…🙈 It may be a frustrating experience when you need a quick and efficient check 👀 or when you perform multiple checks, for which reproducibility matters a lot.

What this post will cover?

This post will be focused on Swedish national trends of antidepressants, antipsychotics, anxiolytics, and sedatives utilization in women. I compare Swedish and Danish national trends of the utilization of these medications in part II.

Let’s go!

All code for the plots included in this post is available here.

Antidepressants utilization in Swedish women was increasing starting in 2010. In 2019, 104 Swedish women per 1000 female inhabitants aged between 20–24 had a prescription of any antidepressant; 166 Swedish women aged between 45 and 54 years per 1000 female inhabitants in this age category received an antidepressant prescription.

Antipsychotics utilization among Swedish women has risen sharply since 2007 for women in the age categories 20–24 years and 25–34 years. In 2019, 15 Swedish women per 1000 aged between 20–24 years, 17 Swedish women per 1000 aged between 25–34 years, 18 Swedish women per 1000 aged between 35–44 years, and 21 Swedish women per 1000 aged between 45–54 years received antipsychotics prescription.

Anxiolytics utilization among Swedish women between 20 and 54 years of age was increasing from the beginning of medication utilization data recording in 2006. Starting in 2015, the rates of anxiolytics utilization were decreasing in women of all investigated age categories. In 2019, anxiolytics utilization varied between 46 women per 1000 in age category 20–24 years and 73 women per 1000 in the age category 45–54 years.

Sedatives utilization among Swedish women was between 44 women per 1000 in age category 20–24 years and 101 women per 1000 in the age category 45–54 years. The rates of sedatives utilization remained nearly unchanged between 2006 and 2019 for women aged 45–54 years and were increasing among women between 20 and 44 years of age.

Data caveats

The data do not include medicines that are sold without a prescription.

No data on the indication. Medication with the same ATC code with distinct indications will be aggregated.

“Number of patients” is the number of individuals who received a drug prescription at least once during the calendar year. For some medications, the “number of patients” can exceed the actual size of the given population

The same individual may receive several prescriptions for different. medications and therefore when summing over several drug groups, the same individual will be counted several times.

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