Therapie
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COVID-19 is an unprecedented challenge for physicians and scientists. Several publicized drugs are being used with not much evidence of their efficacy such as hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin or lopinavir-ritonavir. Yet, the cardiac safety of these drugs in COVID-19 deserves scrutiny as they are known to foster cardiac adverse ADRs, notably QTc interval prolongation on the electrocardiogram and its arrhythmogenic consequences. ⋯ "Off-label" use of treatments in COVID-19 increases the risk of cardiac ADRs, some of them avoidable. Even if these drugs are perceived as familiar, they are used in patients with added risk factors caused by infection. Precautions should be taken to mitigate the risk, even if they will be proven efficacious.
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While more than 7000 rare diseases have been identified, only about 5 percent benefit from a licensed treatment. As the majority of these diseases is life threatening, these facts underscore the need for new drugs. Drug repositioning is an alternative strategy in drug development, which represents an attractive opportunity for rare diseases. ⋯ Drug repositioning is considered in the field of orphan drugs as being a faster and somehow less costly strategy than traditional new drug development for pharmaceutical companies. While several successful repositioning cases have been discovered by serendipity, most successes straightly derive from the molecular characterization of the concerned disease. This short commentary is mainly dedicated to these rationally-based success stories.
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Neuropathic pain is defined as pain caused by a lesion or a disease affecting the somatosensory nervous system. Development of neuropathic pain is induced by many pathophysiological mechanisms affecting pain pathways. Neuropathic pain has diverse origins, making its management difficult, hence, many patients with neuropathic pain do not receive appropriate treatment. ⋯ Capsaicin and lidocaine patches are second line treatments, tramadol and strong opioids are third line treatments. This work also highlighted molecules with inconclusive recommendations or non-recommended pharmacological treatments based on a low quality of evidence, a lack of efficacy or a bad safety profile. The objective of this paper is to present the different treatments and to detail their mechanisms of action.
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The immunotherapies known as "inhibitors of checkpoint" (ICP) are monoclonal antibodies used since 2010 and have dramatically modified the management of the advanced or metastatic melanomas. By reactivating the anti-tumoral immune response, these antibodies can activate the immune system in all the tissues with a risk to induce immune related adverse events (IrAE). Thus, the adverse effect's profile of ICP is considered as very different from that usually associated with conventional chemotherapies. ⋯ The overall survival was 5 months for the patients treated in monotherapy with ipilimumab, and 14 months for those treated by pembrolizumab. Our real life's study tends to confirm the current safety profile of ICP treatment. Moreover and according to our analyses, the drug sequence seems to have a global survival impact.
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Pharmacology is often divided in separate branches, such as molecular and cellular pharmacology, pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, experimental and/or preclinical pharmacology, clinical pharmacology (and therapeutics), pharmacogenetics, pharmacogenomics, pharmacovigilance, pharmacoepidemiology, pharmacoeconomics… This enumeration gives a global picture of different scientific areas, which are however dealing with the same question. Another mindset should be a global interactive and continuous approach, which could be designed as "human pharmacology". ⋯ Examples of such analyses investigating the risk of movement disorders, diabetes related to psychoactive drugs, or the risk of adverse cardiac outcomes with different drugs (classical drugs or protein kinase inhibitors) are given. The increasing number of research works investigating this topic underlines the importance of this relatively new approach, which gives significant inputs for the better knowledge of drug safety.