There's always that part at the end of drug commercials that goes something like: if you develop sausage fingers, webbed feet, or a three-week erection, call your doctor! But as exhaustive as those auctioneer-style lists sound, they barely scratch the surface when it comes to the side effects pople are actually experiencing. Stanford researchers created an algorithm that identified 1,332 drug side effects not currently listed on labels. They estimate that each drug has 329 adverse reactions on average, nearly five times the 69 currently listed. The FDA maintains a database of about 4 million side effects reported by doctors and patients, but no one's sure exactly what causes most of them. That's partly because so many people take more than one drug at a timeseniors take an average of sevenand it's impossible to know how all of the combinations react in each individual. It's also because individuals often react differently to the same drugs. So researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine wrote an algorithm that sifts through millions of reports and surfaces what they call "true" side-effects. They reported their new method in Science Translational Medicine. One important adverse interaction they turned up was that serotonin reuptake … Continue reading →

(Reuters) - Many patients taking a widely prescribed class of oral cancer drugs are also using a variety of medications that could reduce the effectiveness of the cancer treatment or increase its toxic side effects, according to research by Medco Health Solutions Inc. For example, 43 percent of patients taking the highly effective leukemia drug Gleevec were also on another medicine that could diminish its efficacy, while 68 percent were taking something that could potentially raise the toxicity level, the study found. Not surprisingly, the study found that the vast majority of the cancer drugs were prescribed by an oncologist, while the other medicines were typically prescribed by a primary care physician. "More communication needs to take place across all doctors that are prescribing for the patient," said Medco's Steve Bowlin, who is presenting the study findings on Friday at the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics meeting in Washington. The Medco drug interaction study looked at pharmacy claims of about 11,600 patients who had been prescribed any of nine oral drugs known as kinase inhibitors, used to treat a variety of cancers. They include Gleevec and Tasigna from Novartis; Pfizer Inc's Sutent; Nexavar from Onyx Pharmaceuticals Inc and … Continue reading →

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Epidurals and other drug-based treatments are the tried-and-tested way to ease labor pain, but also have side effects that make them less attractive, according to a new overview of women's options for pain relief during child birth. Alternative methods such as water birth, acupuncture and relaxation techniques may help take the edge off the pain without those risks, but it's still unclear just how effective they are. "It's important for a woman to be aware that there are a number of different measures that can help her," said Dr. James Neilson, an ob-gyn at the University of Liverpool in the UK, who led the new work. While there is no one-size-fits-all, trying a low-risk, drug-free approach first makes sense, he added. "I think there is a lot to be said for starting with simple methods and then working up if necessary," he told Reuters Health. "Clearly there is a lot of variation in the amount of pain that women experience during labor." The new report is published by the Cochrane Collaboration, an international group of researchers that puts medical evidence through a rigorous review process. Neilson and his colleagues decided to take a sweeping look … Continue reading →

Public release date: 14-Mar-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ] Contact: Krista Conger kristac@stanford.edu 650-725-5371 Stanford University Medical Center STANFORD, Calif. -- A week ago, you started a new prescription medication for acne. Today, you feel dizzy and short of breath and have difficulty concentrating. Your symptoms are not listed in the package insert as possible side effects of the drug, but why else would you be feeling so odd? Unfortunately, there's no easy answer. Clinical trials are designed to show that a drug is safe and effective. But even the largest trials can't identify irksome or even dangerous side effects experienced by only a tiny proportion of those people taking the drug. They also aren't designed to study how drugs interact with one another in the human body a consideration that becomes increasingly important as people age and their medicine cabinets begin to overflow. Now researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have devised a computer algorithm that enabled them to swiftly sift through millions of reports to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration by patients and their physicians and identify "true" drug side effects. The method also worked to identify previously unsuspected interactions between pairs of drugs, … Continue reading →

An algorithm designed by US scientists to trawl through a plethora of drug interactions has yielded thousands of previously unknown side effects caused by taking drugs in combination. The work, published today in Science Translational Medicine1, provides a way to sort through the hundreds of thousands of 'adverse events' reported to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) each year. Its a step in the direction of a complete catalogue of drugdrug interactions, says the study's lead author, Russ Altman, a bioengineer at Stanford University in California. A program predicts the potential side-effects of mixing different pills. DWImages/Alamy Although clinical trials are often designed to assess the safety of a drug in addition to how well it works, the size of the trials needed to detect the full range of drug interactions would surpass even the large, late-stage clinical trials sometimes required for drug approval. Furthermore, clinical trials are often done in controlled settings, using carefully defined criteria to determine which patients are eligible for enrolment including other conditions they might have and which medicines they can take alongside the trial drug. Once a drug hits the market, however, things can get messy as unknown side-effects pop up. And thats … Continue reading →

ScienceDaily (Mar. 14, 2012) A week ago, you started a new prescription medication for acne. Today, you feel dizzy and short of breath and have difficulty concentrating. Your symptoms are not listed in the package insert as possible side effects of the drug, but why else would you be feeling so odd? Unfortunately, there's no easy answer. Clinical trials are designed to show that a drug is safe and effective. But even the largest trials can't identify irksome or even dangerous side effects experienced by only a tiny proportion of those people taking the drug. They also aren't designed to study how drugs interact with one another in the human body -- a consideration that becomes increasingly important as people age and their medicine cabinets begin to overflow. Now researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have devised a computer algorithm that enabled them to swiftly sift through millions of reports to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration by patients and their physicians and identify "true" drug side effects. The method also worked to identify previously unsuspected interactions between pairs of drugs, most notably that antidepressants called SSRIs interact with a common blood pressure medication to significantly increase the … Continue reading →