Adverse effect (medicine) in the context of Compliance (medicine)

A medical error is a preventable adverse effect of care ("iatrogenesis"), whether or not it is evident or harmful to the patient. This might include an inaccurate or incomplete diagnosis or treatment of a disease, injury, syndrome, behavior, infection, or other ailments.

The incidence of medical errors varies depending on the setting. The World Health Organization has named adverse outcomes due to patient care that is unsafe as the 14th causes of disability and death in the world, with an estimated 1/300 people may be harmed by healthcare practices around the world.

Pharmacovigilance (PV, or PhV), also known as drug safety, is the discipline within pharmaceutical science that addresses the identification, evaluation, and mitigation of adverse effects and other drug-related problems associated with pharmaceutical products.

The etymological roots for the word "pharmacovigilance" are: pharmakon (Greek for drug) and vigilare (Latin for to keep watch). A central concern in pharmacovigilance is adverse drug reactions (ADR), defined as harmful and unintended responses to a medicinal product. That definition includes lack of efficacy: that means that the doses normally used for prevention, diagnosis, or treatment of a disease—or, especially in the case of device, for the modification of physiological disorder function. In 2010, the European Union expanded PV to include medication errors such as overdose, misuse, and abuse of a drug as well as drug exposure during pregnancy and breastfeeding. These are monitored even in the absence of an adverse event, because they may result in an adverse drug reaction. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires that medication errors, overdose, misuse, abuse, and exposure during pregnancy or breastfeeding be included in its pharmacovigilance framework.

An antiemetic is a drug that is effective against vomiting and nausea. Antiemetics are typically used to treat motion sickness and the side effects of opioid analgesics, general anaesthetics, and chemotherapy directed against cancer. They may be used for severe cases of gastroenteritis, especially if the patient is dehydrated.

Some antiemetics previously thought to cause birth defects appear safe for use by pregnant women in the treatment of morning sickness and the more serious hyperemesis gravidarum.

In medicine, screening is a strategy used to look for as-yet-unrecognised conditions or risk markers. This testing can be applied to individuals or to a whole population without symptoms or signs of the disease being screened.

Screening interventions are designed to identify conditions which could at some future point turn into disease, thus enabling earlier intervention and management in the hope to reduce mortality and suffering from a disease. Although screening may lead to an earlier diagnosis, not all screening tests have been shown to benefit the person being screened; overdiagnosis, misdiagnosis, and creating a false sense of security are some potential adverse effects of screening. Additionally, some screening tests can be inappropriately overused. For these reasons, a test used in a screening program, especially for a disease with low incidence, must have good sensitivity in addition to acceptable specificity.

Pharmacogenomics, often abbreviated "PGx", is the study of the role of the genome in drug response. Its name (pharmaco- + genomics) reflects its combining of pharmacology and genomics. Pharmacogenomics analyzes how the genetic makeup of a patient affects their response to drugs. It deals with the influence of acquired and inherited genetic variation on drug response, by correlating DNA mutations (including point mutations, copy number variations, and structural variations) with pharmacokinetic (drug absorption, distribution, metabolism, and elimination), pharmacodynamic (effects mediated through a drug's biological targets), and immunogenic endpoints.

Pharmacogenomics aims to develop rational means to optimize drug therapy, with regard to the patients' genotype, to achieve maximum efficiency with minimal adverse effects. It is hoped that by using pharmacogenomics, pharmaceutical drug treatments can deviate from what is dubbed as the "one-dose-fits-all" approach. Pharmacogenomics also attempts to eliminate trial-and-error in prescribing, allowing physicians to take into consideration their patient's genes, the functionality of these genes, and how this may affect the effectiveness of the patient's current or future treatments (and where applicable, provide an explanation for the failure of past treatments). Such approaches promise the advent of precision medicine and even personalized medicine, in which drugs and drug combinations are optimized for narrow subsets of patients or even for each individual's unique genetic makeup.