Tuesday February 14, 2012

JAPAN NEWS AND DISCUSSION

Takeda renames heartburn drug to avoid errors

Business Mar. 07, 2010 - 01:55AM JST ( 2 )

The requested article has expired, and is no longer available. Any related articles, and user comments are shown below.

Order by Time Order by Popularity

2 Comments

0

elbudamexicanoMar. 07, 2010 - 08:00PM JST

Umm...how the heck can professional pharmacists mistake a heartburn drug with an anti cancer drug??? Can someone out here in WWW land try to explain this to me and to anybody else who may be just as lost as I am now. I am sure professionals do not only go by brand names, they must know the chemical compounds for each and every medicine they are giving out to their patients, right???
0

wanderlustMar. 07, 2010 - 11:46PM JST

Most hospital prescribing is done under the approved name, in this case dexlansoprazole; and there are many other drugs with names which are much more similar, e.g. Xanax and Zantac, Lamisil and Lamictil, even Iodine and Lodine, but often the identity of a medicine can be confirmed by looking at the dosage regimen. Formulation is a second factor, Kapidex comes as 30 mg or 60 mg capsules, while Casodec comes as 50 mg Tablets.

But in busy retail pharmacies, with prescriptions badly written in poor physician's handwriting, with no patient notes or clinical details to verify against, and a badly informed patient who is stressed out being sick; errors could be and have been made, and that's what the FDA is mandating.

There are computer programmes for checking names against similar sounding or written names. One test, the Levenshtein distance can correctly predict 91 per cent of error pairs. An example of how this works is given by comparing Lamictal and Lamisil. To transform Lamisil into Lamictal, the S is changed to a C, the I is changed to an A and the T is added.