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Adverse Drug Reactions, Intoxications and Interactions of Neuropsychotropic Medications

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NeuroPsychopharmacotherapy

Abstract

Any medication has desirable effects (e.g., alleviation of depressive symptoms) and may produce undesirable, unintended effects (e.g., headache or vomiting) which are called ‘adverse reactions’ or ‘adverse drug reactions’ (ADRs). ADRs can be ‘severe’ / ‘serious’ and have to be differentiated from ‘side effects’ and ‘adverse events.’ Definitions for these terms are given in this chapter. Many ADRs can be explained by the pharmacologic target(s) of the prescribed medication. This chapter gives a comprehensive review of these molecular target-based ADRs. To emphasize, some ADRs cannot be explained yet in sufficient detail by the pharmacologic target profile of the prescribed drug. Fortunately, we live in a great era with respect to wealth of and ease of access to information (i.e., the Internet). As no single individual can hold all the ADR information currently available and as it is not advisable to rely on a single database only, this chapter also contains a comprehensive description of available databases on ADRs, pharmacogenetic profiles of drug metabolism, drug interactions – including pharmacogenetic ones – and toxicologic information on medications.

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Conflicts of Interest

Christoph Hiemke is one of the editors of the commercially available database www.psiac.de. Sabine Bischinger and Gerald Zernig declare no conflicts of interest.

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Zernig, G., Bischinger, S., Hiemke, C. (2020). Adverse Drug Reactions, Intoxications and Interactions of Neuropsychotropic Medications. In: Riederer, P., Laux, G., Nagatsu, T., Le, W., Riederer, C. (eds) NeuroPsychopharmacotherapy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56015-1_8-1

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