BMJ  2003;327:1179-1181 (22 November), doi:10.1136/bmj.327.7425.1179

Editorial

Monitoring drug treatment

Criteria used for screening tests should apply to monitoring

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

We all want our treatments to work, and none of us wishes treatment to cause harm. Monitoring drug treatment is one way of seeing that a treatment works, while protecting the patient from adverse drug effects. For many patients and many treatments clinical evaluation is sufficient. An example is measuring the blood pressure in a patient on antihypertensive treatment. When therapeutic goals cannot always be directly observed, monitoring may require blood tests in order to know whether they have been reached. An obvious example is the measurement of the international normalised ratio (INR) in patients treated with warfarin. As well as ensuring that the therapeutic goal, the prevention of thrombosis, is likely to be met,¹ measuring the INR helps to avoid the risk of haemorrhage, which rises steeply as the INR increases above 2.0.²

Monitoring treatment to anticipate or detect adverse reactions to drugs before they become inevitable or irreversible . . . [Full text of this article]

Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 3GE (munirp@liv.ac.uk)

West Midlands Centre for Adverse Drug Reaction Reporting, City Hospital, Birmingham B18 7QH (R.E.Ferner@bham.ac.uk)

CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    StumbleUpon    Technorati    What's this?

Relevant Articles

Adverse drug reactions as cause of admission to hospital: Authors' reply

Munir Pirmohamed, Sally James, Shaun Meakin, and Chris Green
BMJ 2004 329: 460. [Extract] [Full Text]

Beyond doing

Richard Smith
BMJ 2003 327: 0. [Extract] [Full Text] [PDF]

Joining the DoTS: new approach to classifying adverse drug reactions

J K Aronson and R E Ferner
BMJ 2003 327: 1222-1225. [Extract] [Full Text] [PDF]

This article has been cited by other articles:

• ten Berg, M. J, van den Bemt, P. M., Huisman, A., Schobben, A. F., Egberts, T. C., van Solinge, W. W (2009). Compliance with Platelet Count Monitoring Recommendations and Management of Possible Heparin-Induced Thrombocytopenia in Hospitalized Patients Receiving Low-Molecular-Weight Heparin. The Annals of Pharmacotherapy 43: 1405-1412 [Abstract] [Full text]  
• Smellie, W S A, Wilson, D, McNulty, C A M, Galloway, M J, Spickett, G A, Finnigan, D I, Bareford, D A, Greig, M A, Richards, J (2005). Best practice in primary care pathology: review 1. J. Clin. Pathol. 58: 1016-1024 [Abstract] [Full text]  
• Glasziou, P., Irwig, L., Mant, D. (2005). Monitoring in chronic disease: a rational approach. BMJ 330: 644-648 [Full text]  
• Pirmohamed, M., James, S., Meakin, S., Green, C. (2004). Adverse drug reactions as cause of admission to hospital: Authors' reply. BMJ 329: 460-460 [Full text]  

Rapid Responses:

Read all Rapid Responses

Monitoring Metformin Treatment

Paul S Johnstone, et al.
bmj.com, 11 Dec 2003 [Full text]

Online poll

Find out more here>> and here>>