- Using a Medicare data set, which has thousands and thousands of patients across the United States with stroke. They looked at the risk of depression over one and a half years and found that women were more likely than men to have depression. The strengths of the study include the large sample size, the use of Medicare data, which is pretty robust in all the data that's available and the ability to follow patients over time. One of the drawbacks from using administrative data is that you will use coding. And so you're not using different tools for assessing depression which have been validated in different populations. But the advantage of using an administrative database is that you can get a large sample of the population in the United States.