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Published online 17 March 2008 |
Nature
| doi:10.1038/news.2008.676
Corrected online: 19 March 2008
News
Adverse drug reactions a big killer
Bad reactions to pharmaceuticals account for 3% of deaths in Sweden.
More than 3% of all deaths seem to be caused by adverse reactions to medical drugs, according to new research.
If substantiated by further work, this would make 'fatal adverse drug reactions' (FADRs) the seventh most common cause of death in Sweden, where the research was done (see 'Top killers').
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It is not merely adverse drug reactions that are under-reported in death certificates - a pilot study performed by some colleagues and myself a quarter century ago at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm gave clear indications that alcohol-related causes of death were greatly understated in these documents. Alas, for various reasons the study was never completed, but presumably the raw data and portions of the analyses performed upon them are still to be found in the bowels of the Institute of Forensic Medicine.... Henri
Polypharmacy, the situation in which people have prescriptions for different medications at different pharmacies, can lead to serious drug interactions. That's why current hi-tech computer systems have been developed to track the medication profiles of customers, but privacy issues prevent that from happening in any but those pharmacy chains that share the same computer system. That of course, makes sense in protecting the patient's privacy. But multiple prescribers and multiple pharmacies are not unusual situations for most people, and therefore the danger of serious drug interactions remains an equally serious problem. Emilime