AD-HOC TRACING OF A COHORT OF PATIENTS EXPOSED TO ACITRETINE (NEOTIGASON(R)) ON A NATIONWIDE SCALE

Etretinate has been detected in the blood of women taking acitretine. Because of the proven teratogenic effects of etretinate it was decided to try to trace all users of acitretine in The Netherlands via all drug dispensing outlets (1450 community pharmacies, 95 hospital pharmacies and 636 general practitioners). A request for information on the date of birth, sex, type of prescriber, and the number of capsules dispensed yielded a response rate of 87%. In 61% of all the responding dispensing outlets a prescription for acitretine had been filled. Of these 1153 outlets, 40% had dispensed acitretine to one patient and 52% had dispensed it to 2-5 patients. The 2717 patients comprised 1500 men (55%) and 1217 women, with mean ages of 48 and 53 y, respectively. As against 45% of all the male users, 31% of all the women were in the child-bearing age (15-45 y). The average numbers of dispensed capsules was 167 to users of 10 mg capsules, and 107 to users of the 25 mg capsules. In more than 80% of cases acitretine had been prescribed by dermatologists. Because the large majority of inhabitants in The Netherlands use one community pharmacy, and because most of them have automated records, it is possible to trace a cohort of users quickly and almost completely. Because most large-scale problems with adverse reactions are discovered within the first 2 years of marketing, at a time when exposure and morbidity registries are still collecting information, ad hoc formation of a cohort in this way may be a useful resource for postmarketing surveillance

Modeling basic creep of concrete since setting time

Modeling the early age evolution of concrete properties is necessary to predict the early age behavior of structures. In case of restrained shrinkage or application of prestress load [1], creep plays an important role in the determination of the effective stress. The difficulty lies in the fact that the modeling of creep must be based on experimental data at early age and this data must be obtained automatically because the hardening process of the concrete takes place rapidly during the first hours and also the first days. This paper presents a new methodology to model basic creep in compression since setting. Two kinds of tests are used: classical loadings and repeated minute-scale-duration loadings. The classical test is used to characterize the creep function for one age at loading and the repeated minute-scale-duration loadings test is used to define two ageing factors for the creep function. A new model based on the physical mechanisms and the two ageing factors is presented. A comparison with the Model Code 2010 is done and an advanced way to consider ageing with the Model Code 2010 is presented.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe