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Vitamin D: An important ally?
Vitamin D is commonly referred to as a group of hormone function secosteroids, of which the metabolically active form is 1,25-OH.1 Vitamin D is one of the drugs that has undergone the largest increase in prescription in recent years in Italy, rising from 6.2% in 2013 to 12.6% in 2017.2 The...
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Suspension of the marketing authorisation and restrictions on the use of quinolone and fluoroquinolone antibiotics: maximum caution when prescribing
A widely used class of antibioticsQuinolones and fluoroquinolones are broad-spectrum synthetic antimicrobials that are highly effective in treating a wide range of infections. Although these drugs represent a class of antibiotics of considerable medical importance, their use as a first-line...
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Adverse reactions in Emergency Room and prevention: the MEREAFAPS project
The MEREAFAPS project (Epidemiological Monitoring of Adverse Drug Reactions and Events in Emergency Room) was launched in Lombardy in 2006. The rationale is simple: the vast majority of adverse drug reactions that occur at home take the patient to the emergency room, where doctors and nurses,...
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Pharmacovigilance and Pharmacogenetics: Considerations for the Present and the Future
Inter-individual variability in drug response is one of the most relevant issues for the proper management of patients in clinical practice. The team of health professionals is faced with possible unexpected variations in individual responses to medicinal products responsible for therapeutic...
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The aspirin balance in primary cardiovascular prevention
The use of aspirin (ASA) in the primary prevention of cardiovascular diseases has been discussed in recent years for the uncertainty deriving from the results of the studies, so much so that the most recent guidelines do not recommend their use1. The variegated set of major cardiovascular events...
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The safety profile of direct oral anticoagulants
Direct oral anticoagulants (DOACs), also known as New Oral Anticoagulants (NAOs), have for the first time provided a therapeutic alternative to vitamin K antagonists (VKAs), of which warfarin is the prototype, indicating neither inferiority nor superiority in the prevention of stroke in case of non...
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Teaching pharmacovigilance: a comprehensive modular curriculum
Thanks to the global access to information on the Internet, patients have become more and more critic and sometimes worried about the potential adverse reactions to drugs. This situation has enhanced the necessity for their doctors and other health professionals to update their knowledge on...
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The abuse of "horse tranquilliser"
From Veterinary to humansKetamine, approved as dissociative general anaesthetic for human use by the Food and Drug Administration in the Seventies thanks to its good safety profile (retention of protective airway reflexes, hemodynamic stability and spontaneous ventilation) is a widely used...
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Levetiracetam and rhabdomyolysis
Despite rhabdomyolysis being mostly associated with statins, scientific evidences from literature also support the involvement of antiepileptic drugs, such as phenobarbital and phenytoin.1 Recently, a case of this syndrome was reported in a 27 years old patient under monotherapy of levetiracetam, a...
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Muscular adverse drug reactions associated with proton pump inhibitors: an analysis of Italian data
Statins are considered the first potential pharmacological cause of muscular damage. Even though this was a well-known muscular adverse reaction, when fatal cases of rhabdomyolysis – the most severe muscular adverse reaction – triggered the withdrawal of cerivastatin from the market in 2001, a...
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