Predicting Adverse Effects of Drugs

Abstract

The number of drugs currently available at the commercial level is quite large. The therapeutic importance and the benefit of these are indisputable. However, unknown effects of individual drugs and/or the interaction of effects between drugs may have serious consequences for the health of the population. The use of some drugs may prove to be unsafe and risky, since the response and interaction of the population to their use differ substantially. It is known that in practice and despite all measures taken during the premarketing phase they may be insufficient, since factors such as the patients age, clinical history and interaction with other medicinal products may be at the apex of these undesirable effects. This report gives an overview of existing studies of detection and prevention of adverse drug effects and the possible contribution of informatics to the diagnosis of this problem. We go one step further and, propose to study and apply the use of Data Mining techniques to prevent the adverse effects of drugs.