Very interesting and timely PowerPoint focusing on (now increasingly preventable) adverse outcomes, not on metabolism-related lack of efficacy.

>>It has been shown that variability in drug metabolism can have a substantial effect on clinical outcomes in patients. The impact of such variability in inter-individual responsiveness to the same dose of a given drug has historically received considerable attention. Drug metabolism is affected by numerous factors of both environmental and genetic origin. Recently, increased attention has been given to the genetic factors that may affect drug metabolism. A substantial portion of the population may have altered drug metabolism due to genetic factors that substantially affects their ability to metabolize specific drugs. These individuals are identified as slow metabolizers. Such individuals tend to accumulate substantially higher drug concentrations than normal metabolizers, which increases their risk for drug-related adverse events. It is important that clinicians consider the influence of slow metabolizer status when confronted with an adverse drug reaction. This slide set will discuss the issue of slow metabolizers, and will review several drugs that have been associated with slow metabolizer populations, including mephenytoin, hydralazine, isoniazid, and the newly marketed antihistamine, desloratadine.<<

The full slideshow is posted here:

mdnet_metabolic_v1.PDF – mdnet_metabolic_print.pdf.