Studies:

Scope: human

Type: string

Description: Medication of subjects is annotated internally by marking the respective metadata columns as "drug". Individual drugs are mapped to ATC codes via the ChEMBL database. Drug classes (like antibiotics or proton-pump inhibitors) are annotated as ATC codes (J01 and A02BC, respectively).

Note: Many drugs have multiple indication areas, e.g. aspirin is not only a pain-killer, but also a blood thinner. Drugs can also be applied in various ways, e.g. an antibiotic drug can be used orally or topically. We cannot distinguish between these. Therefore, when you explore the medication hierarchical tree, please be aware that e.g. not all drugs under "dermatologicals" are actually used as such.

The download files also contain an automatically generated field medication_with_parents that also includes the whole ATC hierarchy. Therefore, when different samples are annotated with different drugs of the same class, they will share that drug class in the medication_with_parents field.