Medicines are very common thing in our lives. Generally, we tend to take medicines for minor or major problems. But, many of us do not think about the side effects of the drug which we are going to consume for our well being. The doctors do not tell us about the side effects that prescribed drug can have. Now onwards, you can check yourself about the side effects or adverse effects of your prescribed medicines. Drugcite is a website that can help you know the side effects of the drugs. This site is absolutely free to use and does not require any registration.
This website displays side effects of drugs that have been reported to the FDA by the people who consumed the drug. Displayed data comes from the FDA (Food and Drug Administrations) AERS (Adverse Event Reporting System). AERS is a database used by the FDA to keep a check on all approved medicines and therapeutic biologic products. The FDA uses AERS to observe the new adverse events and medicinal errors that may occur with these products.
This data is submitted by physicians, healthcare consumers and lawyers then the FDA scientific staff will evaluate these events to determine if a particular safety concern is linked, and probably caused due to exposure to a particular drug. After gathering data from the FDA & AERS, Drugcite removes duplicate entries and entries with deformed data using a set of algorithms. Drugcite then takes the queries from the users and expands them to include generic drugs and other brand name drugs having the same primary active elements.
When the name of a drug is entered on the home page of the site, all the adverse effects of the drug are displayed in detail. A graph shows the volume of adverse events submitted by quarter for that medicine, along with the related generic and/or brand name drugs with the same primary active ingredients. The side effects will be listed with the number of cases and percentage of that particular symptom. You can get a more detailed overview by clicking on ‘show more’. You can also share this data by clicking ‘Share/Embed Graph’ or even download it by clicking ‘Export Data’.
On clicking the ‘Drug Profile’ button you will get the details like common uses of the drug, number of side effect cases reported, percentage of effected male and female with their average age. You can also view the video about the overview of the drug with written explanations. While going through the video click on any of the slides to know more about them. The video can also be seen in a full screen mode.
From the ‘Learn More’ button you can know about the reasons for which the medicine is being taken and number of adverse event cases with outcomes. The date, age and gender are also provided. If you want to know about some of the cases related to the drug click the ‘Reference’ button to get a brief view of some case reports. Click the ‘About results’ button to get the report containing aggregated adverse events and drug side effects for that drug. This data is availed from the US FDA & AERS, a database that contains over 4,000,000 adverse event reports.
If person finds it difficult to look for a drug, then he or she can just click the ‘Drug’ button on the top to get the list of all the drugs listed alphabetically (A-Z) on the site. Drugcite expands the query of the user using the UMLS (Unified Medical Language System) to include generic drugs and primary active ingredients. While the center of Drugcite’s advanced drug filtering algorithm is based on the industry standard UMLS, its proprietary filtering system also includes dozens of additional steps to settle deformed drug named in the FDA’s data.
DrugCite counts a drug only if the submitter of the adverse event indicates that the medicine may be the cause of the adverse event. Depending on the way the data is collected, different counts may occur. When a person submits an adverse event to the FDA, the submitter can attribute numerous adverse events to one or more drugs. Though, when Drugcite aggregates by individual safety reports irrespective of the details of the adverse events, the report is counted only once.
Pros:
- Free to use
- Registration not required
- Detailed side effect breakdown
- Easy to search the drug you are looking for
- Graphs to view the side effects
- Share data on Facebook, Twitter or email
