Drug Interactions occur when a drug’s mechanism of action is affected by the concomitant administration of substances such as foods, beverages, or other drugs.
Types of Drug Interactions:
- Drug-drug interactions. A drug interacts with another drug
- Drug-food/beverage interaction. A drug interacts with something you eat or drink.
- Drug-condition interaction. A drug leads to unexpected effects due to a medical condition you have.
- Methods for Detecting Drug Interactions
- Spontaneous Case Reports
It is a common method of arousing suspicion about drug-related diseases. A prescriber suspects that a condition arising in a patient may be drug-related. He therefore reports either in a letter to the medical journals or to the manufacturer of the drug. By this means, other prescribers are alerted to the possibility of a drug-disease relationship.“Spontaneous Reporting Agencies” are set up to collect and collate such case reports. Although the resulting information collected gives no idea of the frequency with which a given event is caused by a drug, it indicates that several prescribers feel that the event is possibly drug-related.
- Vital Statistics & Record Linkage Studies
The details of the cause of death or of hospitalization are routinely collected and analysed. It gives early warning of an epidemic of drug-related disease. Record linkage studies can be used to great effect in the search for drug-induced disease.
- Cohort Studies
The ‘Cohort’ means identifying a group of recipients of a drug of interest and observing these patients for varying lengths of time and recording what happens to them. This type of study is used for short-term clinical trials of a new drug. Thus, this method is of great value for detecting predictable adverse effects due to excessive pharmacological effects arising during or immediately after short-term treatment.
- Case Control Studies
It involves the comparison of a group of patients with a disease that is thought to be due to a drug with a group of patients who do not have the disease (the controls). The drug histories of the cases and controls are obtained and compared. If a drug is causing the disease, then its use amongst the cases will be far in excess of that found in the controls. Case-control studies can be conducted rapidly and efficiently at relatively low cost.
MBH/PS