Drug Interaction- What You Should Know

Certain adverse drug reactions and drug interactions make for a growing concern within the health industry. A large amount of research has established that the occurrence of drug interactions varies from between three to thirty percent. Drug-drug interactions have the ability to lead to an array of adverse incidents, and it has been said that these unnecessary adverse incidents are actually at number eight for the main cause of death in the United States of America.

These adverse drug related incidents can take on many forms, with one of the most common being drug-drug interactions. A physician has access to a huge number of drugs and the Food and Drug Administration has formerly approved nearly twenty thousand drugs, with an average of three hundred and fifty new ones added to the list each and every year. Quite a few outpatients find themselves on a very intricate regimen of medication with nearly twenty percent reporting major adverse reactions because of the medication they are taking. A conservative study of more than thirty thousand medical records in New York during the eighties, actually found adverse incidents in almost four percent of all hospitalizations. And drug connected complications caused twenty percent of these listed adverse incidents. Because adverse drug related incidents are in the main avoidable, it is vital to deal with their recognition and ultimately, prevention.


Trying to recognize certain drug interactions in the emergency department is a very difficult task, because each patient that arrives is new and hence, unknown to the hospital staff. Therefore the occurrence of possible drug related interactions in this portion of the patient population is extremely high. Quite a few studies have approximated that the frequency of potential drug-drug interactions is about twenty-five percent of patients, and the incidence of clinically related interactions stands at between four and ten percent. Nevertheless, nearly all of the studies used an assortment of screening measures, and only appraised between three and four hundred patients. The actual incidence of drug-drug interactions or potential adverse events in unselected emergency department populations still remains unclear.

Some institutions are now offering a computerized program which allows physicians to re-evaluate their present list of medications or be able to choose their existing medication from a list of over seven thousand medication names. This program silently checks for interactions and then offers a list of possible interactions that the physician could use. This system is proving to be an essential resource in helping to improve the detection of drug-drug interactions by medical staff, especially emergency physicians.

By: Anthony J. Carter

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If you would like to find out more about drug interactions and/or their side effects, visit www.eHealthMe.com, a site that provides millions of user-generated interactions results and more.

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