Safe, rational prescribing with a focus on polypharmacy

Focus on antipsychotic polypharmacy: evidence-based prescribing or prescribing-based evidence?

Clinicians treating patients with antipsychotic medications have long attempted to optimize outcomes in their patients by adapting evidence from clinical trials to clinical practice settings (Stahl, 1999a). However, there is little evidence to guide what to do when patients have poor responses. In such cases, many clinicians attempt innovative combinations of medicines. On the one hand, when su...

Rational polypharmacy

The development of assays for plasma antiepileptic drug concentrations has led to the discovery of many pharmacokinetic interactions, some causing drug intoxication and others resulting in ineffective drug concentrations. In the 1970s, a number of epileptologists began to argue that single drug therapy was desirable in the treatment of epilepsy and this has become the accepted policy when initi...

Drug Recommendation toward Safe Polypharmacy

Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) induced from high-order drug-drug interactions (DDIs) due to polypharmacy represent a significant public health problem. In this paper, we formally formulate the to-avoid and safe (with respect to ADRs) drug recommendation problems when multiple drugs have been taken simultaneously. We develop a joint model with a recommendation component and an ADR label predictio...

Polypharmacy in Bipolar Disorder - a Focus on Drug - Drug Interactions

Background: Drug-drug interactions (DDI) are actually quite commonplace and are responsible for considerable patient morbidity and mortality. The two major varieties of DDI are pharmacodynamic and pharmacokinetic interactions (cytochrome P450 system). Conditions such as bipolar disorder (with many psychiatric and somatic comorbidities) are complex symptom clusters and bipolar patients may need ...

Evolution of clinical pharmacology: a step towards safe and rational prescribing of drugs.