Mini-Sentinel: Quantifying the Impact of Time-Varying Baseline Risk Adjustment in the Self-Controlled Risk Interval Design (PRISM)

This report presents the findings of a comprehensive simulation study to evaluate the performance of the self-controlled risk interval design in the context of time-varying covariates. The self-controlled risk interval design is commonly used to assess the association between an acute exposure and an adverse event of interest, implicitly adjusting for fixed, non-time-varying covariates. Explicit adjustment needs to be made for time-varying covariates, for example, age in young children. It can be performed via either a fixed or random adjustment. The random-adjustment approach can provide valid point and interval estimates but requires access to individual-level data for an unexposed baseline sample. The fixed adjustment approach does not have this requirement and will provide a valid point estimate but may underestimate the variance.