Polypharmacy is increasingly common in the United States, and contributes to the substantial burden of drug-related morbidity. Yet real-world polypharmacy patterns remain poorly characterized. We have counted the incidence of multi-drug combinations observed in four billion patient-months of outpatient prescription drug claims from 2007-2014 in the Truven Health MarketScan® Databases. Prescript...

BACKGROUND The objective of this study is to investigate drug treatment patterns in bipolar disorder using daily data from patients who received treatment as usual. METHODS Patients self-reported the drugs taken daily for about 6 months. Daily drug use and drug combinations were determined for each patient, both by the specific drugs and by medication class. The drug load was calculated for a...

This paper is a review of the current situation of the treatment of human African trypanosomiasis. The existing approved drugs are old, toxic and/or expensive. Therapeutic failures are common. Several factors may contribute to the problems of chemotherapy, including differences in the epidemiology of the disease, difficulties in the diagnosis and staging of the infection, availability, distribu...

Phase I trials in oncology usually enrolling patients with advanced disease who have failed standard treatment options. The primary endpoint of these studies is to establish the recommended dose and/or schedule of new drugs or drug combinations for phase II trials. The guiding principle for dose escalation in phase I trials is to avoid unnecessary exposure of patients to sub-therapeutic doses o...

or the past 25 years intermittent melphalan/prednisone has been widely used in the treatment of multiple myeloma. Several drug combinations have improved the management of refractory disease. More recently, the myeloablative approach has shown promising results. The availability of different chemotherapeutic options requires particular attention to treatment strategies applied to specific disea...

877 VOLUME 46__OCTOBER 17, 2009 Anti-tuberculosis therapy (ATT) with multiple antimicrobials, administered individually or as fixed dose combinations (FDC) is the key to control of tuberculosis. Arguments in favour of FDC include better patient compliance, simplification of prescriptions, easier management of drug supply, reduced programmatic cost, and less chances of developing drug resistance...

MOTIVATION Currently there are no curative anticancer drugs, and drug resistance is often acquired after drug treatment. One of the reasons is that cancers are complex diseases, regulated by multiple signaling pathways and cross talks among the pathways. It is expected that drug combinations can reduce drug resistance and improve patients' outcomes. In clinical practice, the ideal and feasible ...

BACKGROUND Drug interactions can have a significant impact on the response to combinatorial therapy for anticancer treatment. In some instances these interactions can be anticipated based on pre-clinical models. However, the anticipation of drug interactions in the clinical context is in general a challenging task. METHODS Here we propose the pooled analysis of clinical trials as a mean to in...

Resistance arises quickly during chemotherapeutic selection and is particularly problematic during long-term treatment regimens such as those for tuberculosis, HIV infections, or cancer. Although drug combination therapy reduces the evolution of drug resistance, drug pairs vary in their ability to do so. Thus, predictive models are needed to rationally design resistance-limiting therapeutic reg...