Post-marketing drug surveillance is the soul of Pharmacovigilance Courses. Effective long-term monitoring is enabled by it to ensure the safety of drugs.
What is the difference between Drug-related Side effects and Adverse effects?
Terms related to the effects of medications can sometimes be used interchangeably but there are some noteworthy differences among them which is essential to understand the actual meaning of the terms.
Side effects of a drug or medicine are the unintended effects that usually occur when you consume the standard dose of a medication. They are associated with the way medicine works and therefore it is not unexpected to occur. For example, antibiotics can alter the good bacteria in the intestine and result in gastric side effects.
Adverse effects of a drug are not usually related to the treatment, it is the harmful effects that occur unexpectedly while taking the normal dose of any medication. They are not related to a drug's action.
What is the use of this kind of surveillance?
New drugs are only approved after a thousand patients on average are exposed to them. During the trial phase, the efficacy and common adverse effects of a drug are tested and noted and a warning is constructed.
However, once the drug is released on the market a relatively large number of people are exposed to it including patients with serious medical conditions. Other consumers may be taking more than one drug or they might be using the drug for off-label uses. Thus, people who use medicine or drug in a real-world setting differ from those specifically selected individuals taken in clinical trials.
In the post-marketing drug safety surveillance, the pharmacovigilance official plays an important role to discover previously unidentified adverse drug reactions that went unseen in the pre-approval period. Reactions like these can occur due to any of the following below-listed reasons:
- Unrecognized pharmacological effects of the medicines or drug
- Medication errors
- Factors related to specific patient populations
- Drug-food interactions
- Drug-drug interactions
- Drug-disease interactions
- Individual patient factors
How pharmacovigilance makes a good career
There are several good career options in pharmacovigilance. If you are willing to work in the post-marketing safety surveillance system, it is a great option to enhance your knowledge in a realistic setting. This quantifies the risk of adverse reaction in a population treated with the drug. Your job would be to take appropriate regulatory action to prevent or minimize the risk. Meanwhile, you have to communicate these findings to the higher healthcare professionals and patients.
Company Connects Consultancy prepares you for such practical situations through their training and consultancy. Enroll in pharmacovigilance and clinical research courses at zero extra cost and schedule your remote learning timings. Experience the expert training and solutions and get a chance to have a career in some of the top- ranked sectors.
