PrAna

PrAna computes prescribed quantities of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) from NHS primary care prescription data as an R package to enable spatiotemporal analysis of pharmaceutical use and environmental exposure.

Key Features:

• API mass calculation: Calculates prescribed quantities of APIs in kilograms from prescription medications intended for human use.
• Data aggregation and normalization: Aggregates and normalizes national-level NHS prescription data for multiple drug groups.
• Temporal resolution: Produces monthly and annual prescribed-quantity time series.
• Spatial resolution: Computes outputs at individual postcode and general practice levels.
• Medicinal form breakdown: Provides breakdowns of prescribed quantities by medicinal form.
• Targeted and non-targeted API analysis: Supports both targeted analyses of specific APIs and non-targeted API approaches (example: clarithromycin).
• Visualization export: Generates datasets compatible with PrAnaViz (R/Shiny) for interactive visualization and plotting of trends.

Scientific Applications:

• Environmental exposure assessment: Estimating pharmaceutical emissions and environmental loads from prescribed human medicines.
• Prospective environmental risk assessment: Informing risk assessments for environmental pharmaceuticals using prescription-derived API masses.
• Spatiotemporal trend analysis: Analyzing long-term and spatial prescribing trends at postcode and practice scales.
• Public health and policy research: Supporting analyses of prescribing patterns for policymakers, academics, and environmental scientists.

Methodology:

Computes prescribed API masses (kg) from NHS national prescription data (2015–2018), aggregates and normalizes results by drug group, maps quantities to individual postcodes and general practices, produces monthly and annual time series and medicinal-form breakdowns, supports targeted and non-targeted API outputs, and exports datasets for visualization with PrAnaViz (R/Shiny).