Data analysis in women’s health

In this part, I will look into the Danish national trends of sedatives, antidepressants, anti-psychotics, and anxiolytics utilization in women. Then I will compare Danish national trends with Swedish national trends I discovered in Part I.

All code I used for plots used in this post you can find here. The piece of code, which saved the most time for me was the neat ggplot2 wrapper for plotting the medication utilization.

Among Danish women aged between 20 and 54 years, antidepressant utilization was steadily decreasing, while utilization among Swedish women was increasing. In Denmark, 56 women aged between 20–24 and 72 women aged between 35–45 per 1000 women in the population received antidepressants prescription.

Antipsychotics utilization was increasing over the years in both Denmark and Sweden. The rates of antipsychotics utilization were higher among Danish women when compared to Swedish women in the same age categories.

Anxiolytics utilization rates were higher among Swedish women. In Denmark, anxiolytics utilization was decreasing from 1999 until 2019 for women in all age categories between 20 and 54 years.

The rates of sedatives utilization were higher for Swedish women when compared with Danish women of the same age groups. The utilization of sedatives among Danish women was below 50 women per 1000 women of the same age group in the population in all investigated age categories. Among Swedish women, the rate of sedatives utilization was below 50 women per 1000 women in the population only for women between 20 and 24 years of age.

Take home message

• Countries similar in many ways may exhibit different Data patterns
• Antidepressants, antipsychotics, anxiolytics, and sedatives utilization among Danish and Swedish women is far from identical

Thanks for tuning in 🤓