Safety of drugs

Abstract

Liver is the main organ that plays an important role in the biotransformation of medicine in human body. Therefore, drug-induced liver injuries are much more common than official medical statistics show in different countries and on different continents. This circumstance is associated with many factors: the latent course of drug-induced liver injuries, inadequate interpretation of clinical symptoms and clinical laboratory parameters, insufficiently careful investigation of anamnesis, different frequency of use of various medicine in different countries. Drug-induced liver injuries are lesions that are associated with the use of medicine. Drug-induced liver injuries must be diagnosed as early as possible, as the continued administration of medicine can repeatedly exacerbate the severity of clinical manifestations and significantly affect the outcome of the disease as a whole. In addition, legal aspects are also important in this regard, since an unrecognized drug-induced liver injury with continued use of this medicine that allegedly caused this injury is a matter of a frequent professional investigations. The reaction of the liver on medicine depends on many factors: the initial state of liver function (already existing liver disease), heredity, gender, age, alcohol intake and other medicine. Presence of these factors in patients significantly increases the risk of development of liver injuries associated with taking medications, and if the drug-induced liver injury develops, the prognosis of its course will be heavier. Statistically-valid are frequent drug-induced liver injuries in women. The same type of medicine can cause different types of liver injuries in terms of clinical and morphological manifestations. Diagnostics of drug-induced liver injury is often difficult and requires from a specialist certain skills not only the necessity to carefully collect an anamnesis of a patient with a developed disease, but also a good orientation in his clinical and morphological manifestations.

Keywords

• liver damage
• alanine aminotransferase
• aspartate aminotransferase
• liver enzymes
• acute hepatitis
• chronic hepatitis