Regulatory filing citing Drugs - Real World Outcomes paper — United Therapeutics, 2020-04-23
United TherapeuticsUnited TherapeuticsNASDAQ UTHR
Filings SEC · Quote Yahoo cited a paper published in Drugs - Real World Outcomes in a regulatory filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange CommissionU.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
Regulator · Website as the basis for its claims. The company read the manner in which it wrote the paper and the actual scope the paper demonstrated, in sequence. It described where the stock price movement over the following month compared to past cases of the same type. This is a hindsight judgment written after knowing the results. The paper was read only up to the abstract.
The disclosure is written in the press release as follows:
When a U.S. listed company has an event to inform shareholders, the form it files with the Securities and Exchange Commission is called 8-K. The item numbers in the document filed by United Therapeutics on 2020-04-23 were 8.01 Other Events · 9.01 Financial Statements and Exhibits. The company cited a paper published in Drugs - Real World Outcomes in the press release attached to it. If the sentence citing the paper is translated verbatim, it reads as follows.
Medication Adherence and Healthcare Costs Among Patients with Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension Treated with Oral Prostacyclins: A Retrospective Cohort Study. Drugs – Real World Outcomes. 2020 Mar 6.
What readers should first check is where the company placed the paper in the press release. Next, they should determine whether the paper supports the entire company claim or only a part of it. To answer the latter question, one must read the full paper. This article, which has only read the abstract, cannot provide an answer to that.
The scope of the paper mentioned in the abstract is limited to this.
The paper title is Medication Adherence and Healthcare Costs Among Patients with Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension Treated with Oral Prostacyclins: A Retrospective Cohort Study and it was published in Drugs - Real World Outcomes on 2020-03-06. The authors are affiliated with Ascendis Pharma (Denmark) · University of Illinois Chicago · Triangle · United Therapeutics (United States). The summary at the beginning of the paper is called abstract. This article has read only up to this point. The paragraph was written by a person after filtering a draft generated by a machine through numerical comparison, and thus differs in quality from a full reading of the paper.
This study is an observational study involving 256 patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension. The patients were prescribed oral treprostinil or selexipag. Compliance with medication, healthcare resource use, and costs were compared over six months. The group receiving oral treprostinil had lower healthcare and medication costs related to pulmonary arterial hypertension than the selexipag group. However, long-term costs or clinical outcomes were not disclosed.
What the abstract does not answer remains in the full text and appendices. This article, which has not gone beyond the abstract, leaves the gaps as they are. Readers should compare the two citations above to determine which sentence in the abstract corresponds to the citation provided by the company.
One month later, the stock price was within the middle half of the sample.
The remaining return after subtracting the portion that moves with the overall market is called excess return. The date is written as trading day, counting only the days the stock market is open. In terms of the calendar, 20 trading days are about a month. The excess return for the day of the regulatory filing and the following month are listed in the table below.
| Period | Excess return relative to the market | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Five trading days before the filing | +8.7% | The extent of movement before the filing |
| On the day of the filing | +0.4% | On the filing day or the first trading day thereafter |
| Accumulated over +1 to +5 trading days | −8.8% | One week |
| Cumulative +1~+20 trading days | −7.9% | One month |
A bundle of past cases of the same type is called a sample. The position counted from the bottom is expressed as a percentile. The one-month excess return of −7.9% in this case is within the bottom 49% of the 142 samples, placing it in the lower half.
| Sample scale (20 trading days) | Tenth from the bottom | Fourth from the bottom | median | top 25% | top 10% | This case |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Excess return | −31.9% | −20.1% | −6.9% | +5.5% | +19.5% | −7.9% |
Half of the sample falls between the two marks in the middle of the table. One checks from the table whether this case is inside or outside. The sample collects cases where U.S. listed companies wrote papers in 8-K over the past ten years. The company itself is excluded from the sample. The numbers written here are past facts, not rules to apply to the next case.
After the disclosure, the company issued such documents
After the disclosure date, the company issued three 8-K filings, listed only by item numbers. In 8-K filings without titles, the item number indicates the type of content. One can determine whether it was an earnings announcement or a contract based on that number. What exactly occurred is read in the original text of each link.
- 2023-02-22 8-K Item 2.02, 9.01 — Earnings Announcement · Financial Statements · Attached Documents
- 2023-03-31 8-K Item 1.01, 2.03 — Material Contract Execution · Debt Incurrence
- 2023-04-21 8-K Item 5.03, 9.01 — Charter amendment · Financial statements · Attached documents
What this article does not answer
This article, which reads only the abstract, does not answer what method the paper used, what it reviewed, and how far it went. How many times the paper cited by the company was cited afterward can be checked again using the OpenAlexOpenAlex
Data source · Website citation count. What will be seen next is whether the company's next 8-K again cites the same paper.
Glossary
- 8-K
- A voluntary report submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission when a U.S. listed company has something to inform shareholders. It is categorized by item numbers such as earnings, contracts, and executive changes. All events in this article come from this document.
- Excess return
- The remainder after subtracting the overall market return from the stock return. It is used to see the movement of the company alone by removing the portion where the market as a whole rises or falls.
- Trading day
- A date counting only days when the stock market is open. Since weekends and holidays are excluded, 20 trading days are approximately one calendar month.
- Sample and percentile
- A bundle of past cases of the same type is a sample, and the position from the bottom within it is expressed as a percentile. A percentile of 10 means that nine out of ten cases performed better than this case.
- Abstract
- An abstract is placed at the beginning of a paper. The author writes in a few sentences what was done, how it was done, and what results were obtained. Without reading the full text, one cannot know the details or limitations of the methods.