Health
Surely you have often heard how at the end of an advertisement dedicated to a particular drug, you are quickly warned that “in case of side effects, you need to see a doctor.” At the same time, what is written on the drug label itself is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to side effects.
Scientists from Stanford University, in the United States, have created an algorithm that identified 1,332 side effects of drugs that are not currently listed on labels. They calculated that each drug has an average of 329 adverse reactions, five times more than the 69 listed.
The U.S. Drug and Nutrient Administration maintains a database of about 4 million side effects reported by doctors and patients, but no one is sure exactly what causes most of them. This is partly because many people tend to take more than one drug at a time, and older people take about seven drugs on average, so it's impossible to know how all this combination is will affect every single person. This is also due to the fact that people react differently to the same drug.
So US researchers wrote an algorithm that sifted through millions of reports and identified what they call “true” side effects.
Thus, one of the important results of adverse effects was the fact that serotonin reuptake inhibitors, which are antidepressants, interact poorly with conventional ones drugs to lower blood pressure, namely thiazide diuretics, and significantly increase the risk of long QT syndrome, which can lead to cardiac disorders rhythm and death.
But the Drug and Nutrient Administration can't just label this information. To do this, a follow-up study should be conducted, studying people taking antidepressants of a certain group with drugs to lower blood pressure and seeing whether they will develop the same long QT syndrome.
Although clinical studies are being conducted to find out the safety of drugs, the amount of research that would be needed to find out all possible interactions with others with drugs, it would be simply immeasurable. In addition, clinical trials are generally conducted under controlled conditions, with carefully selected patients who are suitable for the study. But once a drug is on the market, unknown side effects occur.
So what do we do with information about the many possible adverse effects of drugs? According to the researchers, data on thousands of side effects have been submitted to the Drug Administration, but it is unlikely that all of this will immediately appear on drug labels, as the task is simply enormous in terms of volume.