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Performing studies using the UK Clinical Practice Research Datalink: to link or not to link?

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Abstract

The Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) is a repository of electronic medical records collected during routine primary care clinical practice in the UK, and is one of the most widely used sources of real-world data for healthcare research. Although CPRD provides access to comprehensive longitudinal patient records, the data does not fully capture diagnoses or outcomes occurring in secondary care and/or mortality. We provide here an overview of CPRD and the potential bias when using unlinked data in certain situations. Linkage of CPRD to other datasets can help to overcome these limitations. We discuss when to consider linkage to secondary care, disease-specific data sources or the official mortality data when conducting research using CPRD data.

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Acknowledgements

We are also grateful to staff at the CPRD for their work and research, which contributes to the continuous improvement of studies using CPRD data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Observational Research and Data Sciences, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Uxbridge, UB8 1DH, UK

    Laura McDonald & Sreeram V. Ramagopalan

  2. Real-World Evidence, Evidera, London, W6 8DL, UK

    Anna Schultze & Robert Carroll

Authors
  1. Laura McDonald
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  2. Anna Schultze
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  3. Robert Carroll
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  4. Sreeram V. Ramagopalan
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Contributions

Laura McDonald (LM) and Sreeram Ramagopalan (SR) are full-time employees of Bristol-Myers Squibb. Anna Schultze (AS) and Robert Carroll (RC) are full-time employees of Evidera. The authors report no other competing interests. All authors have extensive experience of performing observational epidemiological studies using CPRD. After reading a number of publications not considering linked CPRD data, SR conceived the article to provide guidance to researchers. LM identified all research articles comparing linked and unlinked CPRD data and wrote the first draft of the manuscript. AS and RC worked on further manuscript drafts. All authors reviewed and approved the manuscript as submitted.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sreeram V. Ramagopalan.

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McDonald, L., Schultze, A., Carroll, R. et al. Performing studies using the UK Clinical Practice Research Datalink: to link or not to link?. Eur J Epidemiol 33, 601–605 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10654-018-0389-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10654-018-0389-5

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