Given their high prevalence in clinical practice and overlapping indications as benzodiazepines, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs: sertraline, fluoxetine, escitalopram, and citalopram) were included in our conditional logistic models as an active comparator analysis. This is a validated approach employed by previous papers in this topic area(27) to control for unobserved confounding. In other words, the SSRI term assesses whether underlying conditions for which patients were receiving benzodiazepines were contributing to drug-related poisonings.
