During drug development, evidence can emerge to suggest a treatment is more effective in a specific patient subgroup. Whilst early trials may be conducted in biomarker-mixed populations, later trials are more likely to enroll biomarker-positive patients alone, thus leading to trials of the same treatment investigated in different populations. When…

The aim of this work was to design, deliver, and evaluate group case studies focused on the integration of analytical and medicinal chemistry with pharmacy practice. A patient-centered beta-blocker workshop was developed and delivered to year two MPharm and BSc students. Students were tasked with reviewing patient clinical data along with…

During drug development, a biomarker is sometimes identified as separating a patient population into those with more and those with less benefit from evaluated treatments. Consequently, later studies might be targeted, while earlier ones are performed in mixed patient populations. This poses a challenge in evidence synthesis, especially if only…

This study aimed to explore experiences and practices of key research team members in obtaining informed consent for pharmacogenetics research and to identify the approaches used for enhancing understanding during the consenting process. Data collection involved 15 qualitative, in-depth interviews with key researchers who were involved in…

Pain is a multidimensional and subjective experience, and an ideal pain management regime needs to be comprehensive, integrative and involve all relevant persons. Multimodal interventions may include pharmacological, physical, social, psychological and spiritual approaches in order to address pain management at a molecular, functional,…

This article offers a longitudinal computational-rhetorical analysis of biomedical writing on opioids. Using a corpus of 1,467 articles and essays published in the "New England Journal of Medicine" and the "Journal of the American Medical Association" between 1959 and May 2019, this study evaluates diachronic shifts in (a) the…

To reduce medication errors, medical educators must nurture the early development of rational and safe prescribing. Teaching pharmacology is challenging because it requires knowledge integration across disciplines, including physiology and pathology. Traditionally, pharmacology has been taught using lecture-based learning, which conveys consistent…

This article takes a multimodal social semiotic approach to analysing educational textbooks. We are interested in the ways in which educational textbooks contribute to designing our social futures by constructing both the student and the discipline in a particular manner. While a textbook's primary purpose is to provide the reader with knowledge…

The guidelines presented in this document are intended to provide a resource to psychologists interested in the issue of what represents optimal practice in relation to pharmacotherapy. They are not intended to apply to those psychologists who choose not to become directly or indirectly involved in medication management regardless of their level…

This research examined the following questions: (1) how do drug dealers acquire their inventories of prescription medications? and (2) which types of prescription medications do dealers most commonly sell? Data are drawn from a National Institute on Drug Abuse-funded research study that examined prescription drug diversion and abuse in South…

The use of motivational interviewing strategies in the practice of adolescent psychopharmacology is described. Motivational interviewing is an efficient and collaborative style of clinical interaction and this helps adolescent patients to integrate their psychiatric difficulties into a more resilient identity.

Introduction: Knowledge translation (KT) initiatives have the potential to improve prescribing quality and produce savings that exceed the cost of the KT program itself, including the cost of evaluation using pragmatic study methods. Our objective was to measure the impact and estimated savings resulting from the distribution of individualized…

The purpose of this integrative review is to facilitate social work practitioners' understanding of how psychotropic drug harms are assessed in clinical trials and to make specific suggestions for social workers' increased involvement in detecting drug harms in their clients. The authors undertook a comprehensive review of interdisciplinary…

Glutamatergic dysfunction is implicated in the pathophysiology of fragile X syndrome (FXS). The purpose of this pilot study was to examine the effectiveness and tolerability of memantine for a number of target symptoms associated with FXS. Medical records describing open-label treatment with memantine in 6 patients with FXS and a comorbid…

Pharmacogenetics holds the promise of minimizing adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes of cancer patients by identifying patients at risk, enabling the individualization of treatment and the planning of close follow-up and early remediation. This review focuses first on methotrexate, a drug often implicated in neurotoxicity, especially when used in…