(Adverse drug reactions)
"Adverse drug reactions have taken over from syphilis and tuberculosis as the great mimics of other diseases" and yet the importance of adverse drug reactions is often underestimated, say Dr Munir Pirmohamed et al from the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics at the University of Liverpool in this week's BMJ. They say that such reactions are common, can be life threatening and sometimes unnecessarily expensive. The authors make a series of recommendations for clinicians to help them improve the likelihood of patients not incurring adverse reactions to drug treatments.
They conclude by saying that prescribing doctors should always be aware of the toxic profile of the drugs they prescribe and that they should be ever vigilant for the occurrence of unexpected adverse reactions.
Contact:
Dr Munir Pirmohamed, Senior Lecturer in Clinical Pharmacology, Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, University of Liverpool, Liverpool munirp@liv.ac.uk