Sep 10, 2007 9:31 pm US/Eastern
Prescription Drug Reactions Have Doubled
(CBS News)
There are more medicines on the market than ever before, and while they bring relief for everything from depression to cancer, they also bring complications. Sometimes patients have serious or even deadly reactions. As Dr. Mallika Marshall reports, the government is fielding complaints by the thousands.
Prescription medicines save millions of lives every year, but the medical community has learned the hard way, there can be unwelcome surprises.
"A drug you think is being used for one part of the body is actually having an effect on another," says Deborah Wible, Chief Pharmacist at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital.
A new study in the archives of internal medicine says reports of serious reactions to prescription drugs have more than doubled in recent years.
In 2005, nearly 90,000 problems were reported to the FDA.
The number of reported deaths associated with drug therapy also more than doubled to over 15,000.
The FDA isn't sure yet what it means. It could be that drugs aren't being tested well enough before they're released into the marketplace. But another big factor is that more medicine is being prescribed than ever before, so more can go wrong, says Dr. Marshall.
"That would be with diabetes. In the past the patient might have received one or two medications. Now there could be over five medications they're receiving for that condition," Wible said.
When doctors or patients report a bad reaction, the FDA calls it a "serious adverse drug event," which can mean death, birth defect, disability or hospitalization.
And while the increase in reports sounds alarming, the medical community says there is good news in it, too. The information helps them do their job better. And it shows that by reporting prescription problems the public understands more than ever that medicine involves both risk and reward.
(© MMVII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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