Intended for healthcare professionals

  1. Research
  2. Use of HLA-B*58:01...
  3. Use of HLA-B*58:01 genotyping to prevent allopurinol induced severe cutaneous adverse reactions in Taiwan: national prospective cohort study
CCBYNC Open access
Research

Use of HLA-B*58:01 genotyping to prevent allopurinol induced severe cutaneous adverse reactions in Taiwan: national prospective cohort study

BMJ 2015; 351 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.h4848 (Published 23 September 2015) Cite this as: BMJ 2015;351:h4848

All rapid responses

Rapid responses are electronic comments to the editor. They enable our users to debate issues raised in articles published on bmj.com. A rapid response is first posted online. If you need the URL (web address) of an individual response, simply click on the response headline and copy the URL from the browser window. A proportion of responses will, after editing, be published online and in the print journal as letters, which are indexed in PubMed. Rapid responses are not indexed in PubMed and they are not journal articles. The BMJ reserves the right to remove responses which are being wilfully misrepresented as published articles or when it is brought to our attention that a response spreads misinformation.

From March 2022, the word limit for rapid responses will be 600 words not including references and author details. We will no longer post responses that exceed this limit.

The word limit for letters selected from posted responses remains 300 words.

Re: Use of HLA-B*58:01 genotyping to prevent allopurinol induced severe cutaneous adverse reactions in Taiwan: national prospective cohort study

I must apologise for the delay in this response ; I was busy reading the list of 46 authors. I wonder if this is a record for the BMJ for a single page publication?
I remain puzzled why the British Medical Journal has published such an obscure paper in its BRITISH journal. I have seen a severe allopurinol induced rash once in the last 23 years in General Practice, and as the authors point out , the value of the screening test has not been validated in European populations.
I acknowledge that the BMJ is not a parochial publication, and it is desirable to have a spectrum of subjects , but I suspect that there was a better place to publish the paper . The BMJ needs to keep its readership.
Surprisingly ,the journal version of the paper does not indicate the prevalence of the gene in the study population , which rather affects the practical use of the test. It is probably in the on-line version , but I suspect many of us cannot quite justify the time involved in the search.

Competing interests: I have an awful lot of competing interests for my time

10 October 2015
Laurie Davis
GP
South Hermitage Surgery , Shrewsbury
South Hermitage Surgery, Medical Centre
Back to top