Archive for the ‘Health’ Category
Posted by James
A review of six years of hospital data regarding patients with acute myocardial infarction (AMI) shows that the use of aspirin, anti-platelets, and beta blockers has risen steadily in accordance with guidelines suggesting that treatment with these agents lowers mortality. An analysis of data from PharmScope Insights, a free hospital-pharmacy benchmarking program, shows the following trends: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by James
In an academic medical center in a galaxy far, far away, the chairman of the P&T committee’s subcommittee on medication quality received a disturbing phone call from the institution’s Chief Medical Officer, who hurriedly related a most extraordinary story. The account went something like the following:
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Posted by James
Problem: The Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) has received numerous reports that syringes of medication have been mistaken for saline flush solutions, which are used in intravenous (IV) catheters. Such errors often result from look-alike labeling and packaging of multiple-dose vials or from unlabeled or mislabeled syringes. That’s exactly what happened recently in a pediatric emergency department (ED).
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Posted by James
Treatment with gabapentin tablet has been found to be effective in relieving pain caused by PHN, bringing about improved scores and specific domains of the SF-36. These results were well demonstrated in this pooled analysis, which reinforces the findings of the pivotal studies comparing gabapentin with placebo in PHN. Because the demographics of the pooled analysis were consistent with epidemiological data, these find ings may be extrapolated to the PHN population.
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Posted by James
Demographic Data
Table 1 shows a comparison of the demographic data from the Rowbotham and Rice studies and for the pooled analysis.
Only patients who had at least 1,800 mg/day of gabapentin or placebo at baseline and at the end of study were included in the pooled analysis. The total number of patients from the three ITT populations was 334 + 229 + 40 = 603. A total of 603 ITT patients were analyzed. There were more women (54.5%, 329/603) than men (45.4%, 274/603). Most patients were 65 years of age or older (78.5%, 473/603), and almost 50% were older than 75 (46.8°%, 282/603). The median age was 74.
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Posted by James
The clinical studies used for the pooled analysis were of similar design. All were rigorous, multicenter, randomized, double-blind, parallel-design, placebo-controlled trials, and all of them used the same measurements to demonstrate the efficacy of gabapentin in the treatment of PHN. Patients were randomly assigned to receive either medication gabapentin or placebo. They then entered a period of titration to the maximum dose and were monitored for seven to eight weeks.
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Posted by James
INTRODUCTION
Pain is one of the most common reasons why patients seek health care. Estimates indicate that 20% of the elderly in the general population and 50% of community-dwelling older adults have some form of persistent pain. Approximately 20% of older people take analgesics several times a week for pain relief.
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