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Medicines used for treating different disease can pose serious health risks along with their benefits. Some cases of untimely death can be attributable to the side effects of drugs. It is difficult to predict potential side effects of a drug, even after extensive testing, some adverse effects don’t show up until drugs are used by different patients.
Looking at thalidomide drug, it is associated with the adverse side effect of myeloma multiplex, when it is actually used to treat the cancer. Not surprisingly, death itself is an over-reported outcome relative to its actual prevalence among drug side effects; less serious side effects are reported less often.
Some drugs are entered under their brand name or their non-proprietary name, meaning there can be hundreds of names referring to the same active ingredient. Instead of using drug names, researchers organized the database by the chemical structure which is the key to understanding a drug’s therapeutic effect and corrected for duplicate entries.
Reporting of strokes and heart attacks associated with the arthritis treatment, celecoxib, a COX-2 inhibitor, spiked around the time another COX-2 inhibitor, rofecoxib Vioxx came under investigation and was eventually withdrawn from the market.
However, reports of these celecoxib side effects later fell back to insignificant background levels. Conversely, without pooling drugs for analysis by active chemical ingredient, even some known links to side effects did not appear to be significant, such as the sexual side effects associated with use of anti-depressant SSRIs.
Patients don’t respond similarly to the same drug taken as prescribed, and it remains difficult to predict an individual’s response. Medication use should be monitored for individual patients. In many cases, adverse drug events are due to failures to take medication as prescribed- nonadherence. Patients may misunderstand directions, or fail to fill prescriptions they think they cannot afford.
Patients often get into trouble with side effects due to miscommunications about medications, especially pain medications and diabetes drugs. Engaging patients and evaluating their medications on a regular basis could prevents adverse drug reactions and interactions. This can improve patients’ quality of life and prevent untimely death.
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