CONTEXT Recent public outcry has highlighted the rising cost of prescription drugs worldwide, which in several disease areas outpaces other health care expenditures and results in a suboptimal global availability of essential medicines. METHOD A systematic review of Pubmed, the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Guardian was performed to identify articles rel...

Using 2002 Canadian Community Health Survey data, this paper examines the effect of public and private prescription drug insurance on the utilization of psychotropic and non-psychotropic drugs. It is found that prescription drug utilization is characterized by two stochastic regimes requiring use of latent class modelling framework. In many instances, results differ for the classes of high and ...

BACKGROUND The relatively low budget impact of orphan drugs is often used as an argument in reimbursement decisions. However, overall, the budget impact of orphan drugs can still be substantial. In this study, we assess the uptake and budget impact of orphan drugs in the Netherlands. METHODS We examined the number of orphan drugs, the number of patients and budget impact of orphan drugs in th...

New psychoactive drugs (NPDs, new psychoactive substances) enter the market all the time. However, it takes several months to ban these NPDs and immediate action is generally not possible. Several European countries and drug enforcement officers insist on a faster procedure to ban NPDs. Introduction of generic legislation, in which clusters of psychotropic drugs are banned in advance, has been ...

conclusions participants’ experience highlighted the necessity of awareness about adverse side effects of otc drug use; such awareness can be achieved through various methods such as information dissemination and proper culture of drug use promoted by healthcare professionals to resolve the mentioned issues and improve, consolidate, and promote society’s level of knowledge and health. methods t...

with the aim of obtaining information about drug-drug interaction (ddi) between acetaminophen and some of antidepressant drugs (fluoxetine, sertraline and nortriptyline), in the present work we studied the electrochemical oxidation of acetaminophen (paracetamol) in the presence of these drugs by means of cyclic voltammetry and controlled-potential coulometry. the reaction between n-acetyl-p-ben...

introduction: narcotic drug abuse and illicit use of drugs is a major, complicated multifactorial phenomenon affecting most of the societies today. incidence of drug abuse among adolescents is very high. adolescents become addicted to substances more quickly than adults. the aim of this study was to assess the pattern of drug abuse among male adolescents in hamadan. methods: this study was a de...