Safemedicate

  A development that will interest many professionals seeking to optimise safe drug dosage calculations is the discovery by an international group of researchers that patients who have their medication doses matched to their DNA, experience a 30% reduction in side effects. Led by Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) in the Netherlands, the U-PGx consortium also includes such institutions as Uppsala Universitet in Sweden, the University of Liverpool in the UK, and InstitutfürKlinischePharmakologie in Stuttgart, Germany. Henk-Jan Guchelaar, Professor of Clinical Pharmacy at LUMC, coordinated the study. What did the study find out about the matching of medication doses to DNA? There are clearly issues with current “one-size-fits-all” approaches to prescribing medication; patients naturally vary in their genetic information, which means one patient’s response to a specific drug can often be quite different to someone else’s. Some individuals, for example, process medicati...