Adverse effects and pharmacovigilance

Abstract

No drug can be testified to be entirely free of undesired effects. These undesired or unintended effects of drug administration are broadly called adverse effects. When the concept of causality is factored in, the term adverse drug reaction is used. This causality assessment can be done in several ways, Naranjo scale and WHO-UMC scale being the most common ones. Pharmacovigilance is a growing domain that concerns the detection, assessment, understanding and prevention of drug-related adverse effects. On a similar line, hemovigilance is the set of activities that govern adverse effects related to transfusion chains. When the medical materials and devices are involved, it is called materiovigilance, and when cosmetic products are concerned, the cosmetovigilance comes in to play. Addictovigilance is an ill-defined category of events that cover drugs of addictive or recreational misuse. This chapter covers the broad types of vigilance (medicovigilance) and their relevance in the Indian scenario.