Evaluation of the Lack of Essential Information in Medical Literature

Abstract

Primary literature is a basic tool for medical knowledge and for future research. Every researcher relies at some point on the information available in published literature. Also, primary literature is utilized to develop guidelines for the medical use of medications in all kinds of diseases, accuracy is a must in this regard. To evaluate essential information regarding patients, drugs and diseases omitted from efficacy literature on antihypertensive drug safety. Data on antihypertensive adverse drug reactions we retrospectively collected from 219 medical articles using search engines IDIS Iowa Drug Information Services, ScienceDirect, Medscape, Pubmed, Ebscohost, Inside web, Proquest, Emerald and Medline. The data for the study was collected from primary literature carried out on antihypertensive medications in previous years. All of the available information regarding patients (patient’s factors) and drugs was collected in order to evaluate the percentage of the omitted data. 219 primary journal articles were collected, 640 medications from these articles were analyzed. Some of the 640 medications are the same but in different articles. Out of 640 medications collected, 15718 data entries were used which represent patient’s factors and drug factors, age, gender, type of job, renal conditions, alcohol consumption, use of other medications, other diseases, drug dose, drug frequency, dosage form. All these factors were evaluated for the effect on developing adverse drug reactions. The omitted data was classified into four different categories. Age, gender, race, smoking, health status, medication use and any other information related to the patients is basic information which needs to be available in all literature, not just to be mentioned in the methodology and sampling, but to be specified carefully and fully in the results.