Adverse drug reactions numbers

All drugs may cause adverse drug reactions (ADRs). These adverse effects are either unpredictable (hyper-sensitivity) or dose-depending. The risk of ADR is increased for several reasons in the elderly. The physiological alterations, the high number of medications and concomitant diseases increase the risk of ADR. This is further... 

There is no universal definition of polypharmacy. One common definition is the use of five or more drugs. This is also the definition that we use in this book. With increasing number of drugs the risk for adverse drug reactions increases. 

Approximately 10% of new chemical entities (NCEs) show serious adverse drug reactions (ADRs) after market launch. Such events usually result in new black box warnings by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), label change or market withdrawal. The most common causes for these actions are hepatic toxicity, hematologic toxicity and cardiovascular toxicity [2], Reasons for such ADRs, which are identified only after NCEs are launched on the market, include the narrow spectrum of clinical disorders and participating patient profiles in clinical studies as well as the fact that serious ADRs are often rare and that the number of patient exposures required to identify such occurrences sometimes may range over a few millions [3],... 

Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) cost approximately one hundred and thirty nine billion dollars annually 2—4 in the United States. This number is larger than the... 

A number of terms are used to describe an adverse event, including adverse drug reaction (ADR), adverse experience, adverse effect, and albeit rarely, drug misadventure. In this paper, the term adverse event is used in most cases to avoid confusion. 

It is an exdting sdentific challenge to develop predictive methods that capture off-target-related adverse drug reactions reliably with a comparatively small number of compounds and at a reduced number of targets to be screened. The perfect scenario of a full data matrix as a starting point was outlined in the first part of this chapter. 

Observational studies of adverse drug reactions identified two clinical factors that appeared to predispose to a high frequency of adverse drug reactions. These were the total number of different drugs the patient was taking and the presence of preexisting kidney failure. 

Fig. 1. Incidence of adverse drug reactions in relation to age (left panel) and relationship between the number of dmgs taken concurrently and the incidence of adverse drug reactions (right panel). From Nolan and O Malley, 1988 used with...

Adverse drugs reactions are not rare and have increased in number, which may be due to irrational use of multiple drug therapy, availability of most of the drugs as OTC (over the counter) i.e. without prescription and self medication by the patients. 

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