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Clinical Pharmacist, Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Published Online, July 5, 2006. www.theannals.com, DOI 10.1345/aph.1H080
Audience: Intended for a variety of healthcare practitioners, including clinical pharmacists, specialty practitioners, students, internists, general practitioners, and nurses.
Purpose: To provide a comprehensive source of information regarding the identification, detection, prevention, and management of drug-induced diseases for current and future healthcare practitioners. This text is a concise reference that is designed to serve as a constructive supplement in required or specialized courses on drug-induced diseases.
Content: This textbook is organized in 12 sections, which are further divided into a total of 53 chapters. The first section (3 chapters) is dedicated to epidemiology and the impact of drug-induced disease on public health, contributing factors, and postmarketing surveillance of drug-induced diseases. The remaining 11 sections are divided according to organ systems (ie, drug-induced allergic/immunologic diseases; neurologic diseases; psychiatric diseases; respiratory diseases; cardiovascular diseases; endocrine diseases; gastrointestinal diseases; diseases of the kidney and fluids/electrolyte disorders; hematologic diseases; drug-induced bone, joint, and muscle diseases; and miscellaneous), with individual chapters dedicated to specific drug-induced diseases of that organ system. Chapters are structured consistently and include subheadings such as causative agents, epidemiology, mechanisms, clinical presentation and differential diagnosis, risk factors, morbidity and mortality, and management. Each chapter also includes useful summary tables that provide a quick reference for such topics as drugs implicated in specific diseases, signs and symptoms/clinical presentation, and treatment options.
The data are current and include relatively recent (2004) drug with-drawals from the market. The text is indexed and also includes a useful 76-page appendix, which provides a quick reference of drugs/agents (listed alphabetically) with a list of corresponding disease states for which that drug has been implicated, along with corresponding chapter numbers. Color photos and figures are included where appropriate.
Usability: Chapters are individually referenced, and references are up-to-date (up to 2004). The text is competitively priced.
Highlights: Chapter subheadings and layout are consistent, which alleviates interchapter inconsistencies due to varying author writing styles. The appendix described above provides a system for cross-reference when searching by drug, while the table of contents allows readers to search by organ system. Therapeutic controversies are discussed (eg, oral contraceptives and stroke, cross-sensitivity in drug-induced allergy, class effects of drug-induced disease) and suggestions are made as to how to best proceed in such instances.
Limitations: The text covers a wide scope of organ systems and therefore cannot provide detailed information regarding specific mechanisms of drug-induced disease. While references are provided wherever possible, the scope of coverage limits the quantity of information provided.
Comparison with Other Related Books: While there is no other current comprehensive drug-induced diseases text for comparison, there are organ-specific drug-induced diseases texts available that offer a more in-depth evaluation of specific drugs and their subsequent association in specific organ disease. Drug-Induced Diseases: Prevention, Detection, and Management incorporates these various organ diseases into one concise, but more general, tertiary reference.
Summary: Drug-Induced Diseases: Prevention, Detection, and Management is a valuable tertiary reference for identifying the potential for drugs to be implicated in causing disease and for providing resources for the management of subsequent cases or episodes. The authors achieve their purpose of providing a practical and convenient reference for any teaching environment or institutional library, as well as for individuals who are faced with the challenge of assessing the potential for drugs to cause or exacerbate disease.
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