Esmé Baan received NRS Travel Grant
As a PhD candidate investigating asthma therapy in children, the NRS travel grant gave me the opportunity to visit the 34th International Conference on Pharmacoepidemiology & Therapeutic Risk Management held in Prague.
The annual conference focuses on epidemiologic approaches to study the use, effectiveness, value and safety of pharmaceuticals. Amongst the speakers and attendees are pharmacists, statisticians, physicians, and epidemiologists. Therefore this conference was an ideal opportunity for me to learn more about methods to study asthma drugs.
The conference started with courses on different aspects of pharmaco-epidemiology. Some of the courses I attended were ‘Adherence’, ‘Using Pharmacoepidemiology Database Resources to Address Drug Safety Research’, and ‘Pediatric Pharmacoepidemiology’. In addition, I was invited to present some of my work on posters. The studies I presented were about the association between hair cortisol and inhaled corticosteroids, and about drug utilization by asthmatic patients. This lead to interesting discussions about study design and analytical methods which will help to improve my work. The oral presentations of this conference did not cover many respiratory studies, but showed very interesting methods. One of the methods I want to implement in my own research is group-based adherence trajectories, which is being used more often in other fields and seems also very appropriate to study the adherence of asthmatic patients.
In short, ICPE brought me and our group new knowledge, exposure by presenting our data and helped me expand my professional network. For this I would like to thank the NRS for the grant and support.
Esmé Baan, M.D.
