Population-Based Studies of Adverse Drug Effects

The prescription of medications has long been the most frequent therapeutic intervention in medicine. In 2000 in the United States, 173 million people filled 2.2 billion outpatient prescriptions, accounting for $103 billion in expenditures. Because all medications have risks, the appropriate therapeutic use of pharmaceutical agents requires quantitative information on safety as well as efficacy.In this issue of the Journal, a thoughtful investigation reported by Strom and colleagues (pages 1628–1635) shows that patients who have had a hypersensitivity reaction to sulfonamide antibiotics are no more likely to have a reaction to nonantibiotic sulfonamides than are patients who have had . . .