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Side‐effects of Drugs Annual 27

2005; Wiley; Volume: 60; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1365-2125.2005.02451.x

1365-2125

R E Ferner,

Helicobacter pylori-related gastroenterology studies

Side-effects of Drugs Annual 27 Editor J. K. Aronson . Published by Elsevier , Amsterdam , 2004 . HB 636 pages. Price £ 155.00 . ISBN 0444513566 The 27th Edition of Side-effects of Drugs Annual (SEDA), which collates data from 2002, was published in 2004. To this extent, it evokes the picture of some prewar colonialist reading each day a carefully ironed copy of The Times published 6 weeks before. Exciting news – of the evolving story of stroke risk in patients treated with risperidone and other antipsychotic medicines, for example – may not yet have reached us; but at least we have all the earlier data. A brief search of the internet shows some of the difficulties that SEDA faces. For example, Carvajal and Martin Arias mention a case report of priapism with zuclopenthixol. PubMed offers this 2002 case, and two earlier cases – a veritable case series. Del Favero, in one of the SEDA review articles, postulates that Helicobacter pylori eradication ought to reduce the incidence of peptic ulcer disease in patients treated with selective COX-2 antagonists. He will not have seen the recent paper by Chang et al.[1] reporting that eradication of H. pylori reduced gastric damage in rofecoxib-treated Mongolian gerbils, and neither del Favero nor Chang will know that rofecoxib increases the risk of myocardial infarction by 20–25%[2, 3]. Pubmed (and so the internet) is more up-to-date and better able to discover reports of rare adverse effects. However, it does not provide any independent analysis. The special review articles in SEDA add greatly to its value by their dissection of topics in pharmacovigilance. There are 35 essays in this edition, covering topics from Botulinum A toxin to Lorenzo's oil. They are not of uniform quality or layout. Some, such as Dittmann's review of surveillance of adverse events following immunization, summarize previously published findings; while others, like Reuter's review of folic acid supplementation, and Krans's analysis of antidiabetic treatment, provide well-argued independent conclusions. Herschel Jick's essay on The General Practice Research Database (GPRD) is part historical, part political, and part scientific. It is also liable to induce envy: GPRD was donated to the Department of Health, but few British research workers can afford to pay the fees to use it. All the reviews are well written, and this implies sedulous editing by Jeffrey Aronson. You will benefit by having access to SEDA-27, but like other SED and SEDA publications, it relies on cross-referencing to previous editions, so it is less useful in isolation. Persuade your library to buy it. At £155, even for 600 pages printed on acid-free paper, the opportunity cost may be rather high. The major strength is in its reviews. It also allows the reader to browse through a year's experience of the adverse reactions literature and repair gaps in knowledge and lapses of memory. It cannot now compete with searchable on-line databases in answering questions about specific reactions to individual drugs or classes of drugs. It is inevitably out-of-date. In that regard, the internet has done for SEDA what the wireless and the BBC World Service did for sea-mail editions of The Times. R.E.F. was coeditor of the 5th Edition of Davies's Textbook of Adverse Drug Reactions. He has collaborated with J. K. Aronson in a number of research projects.