About the Authors

Emily W. Bratton

emily_bratton@unc.edu

Affiliation Department of Epidemiology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States of America

Nada El Husseini

Affiliation Department of Medicine, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, United States of America

Cody A. Chastain

Affiliation Department of Medicine, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee, United States of America

Michael S. Lee

Affiliation Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America

Charles Poole

Affiliation Department of Epidemiology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States of America

Til Stürmer

Affiliation Department of Epidemiology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States of America

Jonathan J. Juliano

Affiliation Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America

David J. Weber

Affiliations Department of Epidemiology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States of America, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America

John R. Perfect

Affiliation Department of Medicine, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, United States of America

Competing Interests

EWB, NEH, MSL, CAC, CP, JJJ and DJW have declared that they have no competing interests. The following authors have the following conflicts to declare: JRP has research grants, consulting and honorariums from Enzon, Pfizer, Merck, Astellas and Schering-Plough. TS does not accept personal compensation of any kind from any pharmaceutical company, though he receives salary support from the UNC Center of Excellence in Pharmacoepidemiology and Public Health and from unrestricted research grants from pharmaceutical companies to UNC. TS also receives research funding as Principal Investigator of the UNC-DEcIDE center from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. However, this does not alter the authors' adherence to all the PLoS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: EWB NEH CAC MSL JRP. Performed the experiments: EWB NEH CAC MSL. Analyzed the data: EWB. Wrote the paper: EWB. Interpretation of data: EWB CP TS JJJ DJW JRP. Selection of analytic tools: EWB CP TS JRP. Critical revision and editing of manuscript: CP TS JJJ DJW JRP.