Antidepressant prescribing in five European countries: Application of common definitions to assess the prevalence, clinical observations, and methodological implications

Purpose Drug utilization studies have applied different methods to various data types to describe medication use, which hampers comparisons across populations. The aim of this study was to describe the time trends in antidepressant prescribing in the last decade and the variation in the prevalence, calculated in a uniform manner, in seven European electronic healthcare databases.