Drug Safety Matters brings you the best stories from the world of pharmacovigilance. Through in-depth interviews with our guests, we cover new research and tren...
#34 Veterinary pharmacovigilance, Part I – James Mount
Human and veterinary pharmacovigilance (PV) share many goals, challenges and approaches. But there are also significant differences, such as the numerous species and breeds that veterinary PV needs to take into account. In this two-part episode of Drug Safety Matters, James Mount, Veterinary Pharmacovigilance assessor at the Swedish Medical Products Agency, and EU elected chair of the Pharmacovigilance Working Party for veterinary medicinal products, joins the show to talk about veterinary PV practice and its differences and similarities to human PV. Tune in to find out:What are the similarities and differences between veterinary and human pharmacovigilance?How is animal health connected to public health? What types of adverse events are reported on the veterinary side compared with the human side? What can be found in the EU veterinary pharmacovigilance database? Want to know more?The new veterinary medicines regulation (Regulation (EU) 2019/6) can be found here. The public portal of the European Union Veterinary Pharmacovigilance Database.WHO's information page on One Health, an integrated approach to the well-being of people, animals and the environment.A survey of veterinary professionals in Sweden, about current practices and attitudes in relation to adverse events reporting and the accessibility of product safety information.A review of adverse events in animals and children after secondary exposure to transdermal hormone-containing medicinal. A study looking at suspected adverse drug reaction reporting in veterinary free‐text clinical narratives.The EMA Big Data strategy for veterinary medicines in the EU. Data quality framework for medicines regulation | European Medicines Agency (EMA)Small Animal Veterinary Surveillance Network (SAVSNET) - University of LiverpoolVetCompass - Royal Veterinary College, RVCReflection paper on the use of artificial intelligence in the lifecycle of medicines | European Medicines Agency (EMA)The Swedish Medical Products Agency's online reporting form for suspected adverse drug reactions in animals (In Swedish). Join the conversation on social mediaFollow us on X, LinkedIn, or Facebook and share your thoughts about the show with the hashtag #DrugSafetyMatters.Got a story to share?We’re always looking for new content and interesting people to interview. If you have a great idea for a show, get in touch!About UMCRead more about Uppsala Monitoring Centre and how we work to advance medicines safety.
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#33 Narrative fields and signal assessors, an exploratory study – Joana Félix and Alem Zekarias
While structured data elements such as patient identifier, medicine name and reaction, are fundamental for adverse event reporting, they may not capture all relevant details. This is where the narrative fields come in, allowing reporters to disclose important contextual information, such as the patient’s full clinical course. But how do PV assessors interact with these narratives in spontaneous reports? What needs and challenges do they experience? These and other questions were addressed in an exploratory interview study by UMC researchers Joana Félix and Alem Zekarias. Tune in to find out:What challenges are PV assessors faced with, when working with narratives? How could automation of certain tasks help streamline narrative analyses in the future?How can reporters craft narratives that effectively document adverse events? Want to know more?Pharmacovigilance assessors’ experiences interacting with narrative fields in spontaneous reports: an exploratory interview study – poster presented at the 23rd ISoP Annual Meeting “Global Perspectives on Pharmacovigilance in the Digital Age and Advanced Therapeutics”, 1–5 October 2024 Montreal, Canada.Current Challenges in Pharmacovigilance: Pragmatic Approaches, by The Council for International Organisations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS). See page 133 on the role of narratives in good case management practices. Join the conversation on social mediaFollow us on X, LinkedIn, or Facebook and share your thoughts about the show with the hashtag #DrugSafetyMatters.Got a story to share?We’re always looking for new content and interesting people to interview. If you have a great idea for a show, get in touch!About UMCRead more about Uppsala Monitoring Centre and how we work to advance medicines safety.
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#32 Pharmacovigilance in older adults – Giovanni Furlan
Medication-related-harm (MRH) is especially prevalent in older adults due to changing physiology as the body ages, increased frailty, and the incidence of polypharmacy in this patient group. Giovanni Furlan, Worldwide Safety Site Lead for Thessaloniki of Pfizer discusses what makes this patient group so vulnerable to adverse drug reactions, how poor representation and using age alone to define older adults exacerbates this problem, and suggests ways forward in monitoring drug safety in older patients. Tune in to find out:What makes older adults especially at risk of experiencing adverse drug reactions and medication errorsWhy frailty is far more useful than age in predicting adverse drug reaction riskHow pharmacovigilance in older patients may be improved through pharmaceutical practice and better representation in clinical trials.Want to know more?This interview all started with Giovanni's Uppsala Reports article on how age is insufficient a measure of adverse event risk. Read it here.For a summary of the key points discussed in this interview, read Giovanni’s paper on the status of drug safety in geriatric patients.If our discussion of frailty piqued your interest, read this paper on the biology of frailty and how this impacts clinical pharmacology, this multi-centre cohort study that shows frailty is significantly correlated with MRH, and this commentary advocating for consideration of MRH as a geriatric syndrome, which needs to be managed as such. As Giovanni mentioned in the interview, Harlan Krumholz was the first to describe post-hospital syndrome. Learn more about this syndrome by reading his paper.For more on prescribing cascades, their prevention, detection, and reversal, read this paper by Brath and colleagues.Join the conversation on social mediaFollow us on X, LinkedIn, or Facebook and share your thoughts about the show with the hashtag #DrugSafetyMatters.Got a story to share?We’re always looking for new content and interesting people to interview. If you have a great idea for a show, get in touch!About UMCRead more about Uppsala Monitoring Centre and how we work to advance medicines safety.
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#31 A guide to reporting disproportionality analyses – Michele Fusaroli and Daniele Sartori
Disproportionality analyses are a mainstay of pharmacovigilance research, but without clear guidelines, they often lead to confusion and misinterpretation. Enter the READUS-PV statement: the first-ever guide for reporting disproportionality analyses that are replicable, reliable, and reproducible. Tune in to find out: The history of reporting guidelines in pharmacovigilance and why the READUS-PV guidelines were created Why there has been a spike in the publication of disproportionality analyses in recent years and what this means for their reliability What it means to publish “good” pharmacovigilance science Want to know more? Read the READUS-PV guidelines, why they were created, and why they are important. In 2021, Khouri and colleagues showed that current methods and models used for disproportionality analyses are unreliable, and Mouffak and colleagues found that there is a tendency to overstate results in published disproportionality analyses. A book on data mining techniques in Pharmacovigilance by Poluzzi and colleagues delves deeper into this exponential increase in disproportionality analyses. This paper elaborates on the Delphi technique, and how it is used to gather data from reviewers to achieve scientific consensus on a problem. Join the conversation on social mediaFollow us on X, LinkedIn, or Facebook and share your thoughts about the show with the hashtag #DrugSafetyMatters.Got a story to share?We’re always looking for new content and interesting people to interview. If you have a great idea for a show, get in touch!About UMCRead more about Uppsala Monitoring Centre and how we work to advance medicines safety.
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Uppsala Reports Long Reads – Weeding out duplicates to better detect side effects
Duplicate reports are a big problem when it comes to signal detection, but with the help of machine learning and new ways of comparing reports, we may more effectively detect them. This episode is part of the Uppsala Reports Long Reads series – the most topical stories from UMC’s pharmacovigilance news site, brought to you in audio format. Find the original article here.After the read, we speak to author Jim Barrett, Senior Data Scientist at UMC, to learn more about the duplicate detection algorithm and UMC’s work to develop AI resources for pharmacovigilance.Tune in to find out:How the new algorithm handles duplicates in VigiBaseAbout different approaches for developing algorithmsWhy it can be challenging to evaluate the performance of an algorithmWant to know more?Listen to the Drug Safety Matters interview with Michael Glaser about his Uppsala Reports article “Ensuring trust in AI/ML when used in pharmacovigilance” and check out the episode’s extensive list of links for more on AI in pharmacovigilance. Artificial intelligence in pharmacovigilance – value proposition and the need for critical appraisal, a presentation by Niklas Norén, Head of Research at UMC, given at University of Verona in April 2024. Finally, don’t forget to subscribe to the monthly Uppsala Reports newsletter for free regular updates from the world of pharmacovigilance.Join the conversation on social mediaFollow us on X, LinkedIn, or Facebook and share your thoughts about the show with the hashtag #DrugSafetyMatters.Got a story to share?We’re always looking for new content and interesting people to interview. If you have a great idea for a show, get in touch!About UMCRead more about Uppsala Monitoring Centre and how we work to advance medicines safety.
Drug Safety Matters brings you the best stories from the world of pharmacovigilance. Through in-depth interviews with our guests, we cover new research and trends, and explore the most pressing issues in medicines safety today. Produced by Uppsala Monitoring Centre, the WHO Collaborating Centre for International Drug Monitoring.
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