Doctors warned to be wary of new drugs

Doctors should be wary of starting their patients on newly approved drugs, because of the high rate of adverse side effects that go undetected until late in the post-marketing surveillance period, a new study says (JAMA 2002;287:2215-20).

More than 10% of new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have serious side effects that are not discovered on initial testing and marketing, says the study, led by Dr Karen Lasser and Dr Paul Allen of the Department of Medicine at Cambridge Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The investigators analysed 548 drugs approved by the FDA from 1975 to 1999. The list …