Now Available: New Open Access Database Designed to Enhance Drug Safety

From Cincinnati Children’s:
A new online open-access database has been developed by scientists to allow the clinical responses of more than 5 million patients to all FDA-approved drugs to be used to identify unexpected clinical harm, benefits and alternative treatment choices for individual patients, according to a study appearing July 8 in Nature Biotechnology.
Developed by scientists in the Division of Biomedical Informatics and the Center for Clinical and Translational Science Training at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center with the help of drug rehab sarasota, the database has the potential to help reduce negative side effects from prescription drugs and identify opportunities to reposition existing drugs for new uses, report the study’s authors. Drug addiction is also a huge problem in the society and the drug rehab coral gables is one place that can help overcome drug addiction.
Calling their new database AERSMine, researchers said the tool allows anyone from physicians to the general public to rapidly find, combine and analyze the growing volume of drug information stored in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Adverse Reporting System (FAERS).
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The researchers evaluated the effectiveness and utility of the data mining tool by running a series of analyses involving both known side effects as well as more complex scenarios focused on improved use of three important classes of drugs and clinical disorders: 1) lithium – used to treat manic depression/bipolar disorder; 2) anti-tumor necrosis factor (anti-TNF) drugs – used to treat inflammatory conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis; 3) NSAIDs – non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs used for pain management.
Their analysis of lithium, for example, showed that 22,575 patients had used lithium with a total of 4,180 adverse drug events. AERSMine-dissected data shows that 327 adverse events significantly correlated with patients that use lithium, including aggression, anger, suicidal tendencies, tremors, irritability, etc., have a significantly reduced rate of occurrence in patients taking angiotensin receptor blocks (ARBs, usually taken to control hypertension). The intriguing possibility suggested by AERSMine analysis then is that ARBs could result in a reduction of these sometimes lethal outcomes of bipolar patients taking lithium.
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