RxISK adds 320,172 Health Canada reports of adverse events to its drug safety database

Toronto, Ontario — September 26, 2013 – RxISK.org, the first free, independent website for researching and reporting prescription drug side effects, has added to its drug safety database more than 320,000 adverse drug events reported to Health Canada from 1965 to March 31, 2013.

The RxISK database now has more than 4.8 million reports of suspected adverse drug events — as reported to the FDA, Health Canada, and directly to the RxISK website itself — covering more than 17.4 million suspected side effects.

“Medical conditions and drugs to treat them know no borders, and it’s important for patients and their doctors to have access to as much information as possible in assessing drug risks and benefits,” says RxISK Chief Medical Officer Dr. Dee Mangin, the new David Braley & Nancy Gordon Chair in Family Medicine, at McMaster University in Hamilton. “We hope to get permission to add other countries data to expand this global database of drug side effects”.

“Medical conditions and drugs to treat them know no borders, and it’s important for patients and their doctors to have access to as much information as possible in assessing drug risks and benefits”

“The RxISK mission is to move prescription drugs, taken as prescribed, out of the top five leading causes of death,” Dr. Mangin says. “It’s interesting to note, that for some drugs, there are almost as many reactions reported from Canadians in the FDA database as there are in Health Canada’s database itself. RxISK aims to change this with its MADE IN CANADA solution.”

There is no charge to search the database so patients, Doctors, & Pharmacists, can easily search for drug side effects and quickly do an individualized check for drug interactions.

RxISK also offers a free personalized RxISK Report and RxISK Score which indicates for an individual patient how likely their symptoms are related to their drugs. This is to take to their doctor or pharmacist to help inform the discussion as to whether the effects they are experiencing could be linked to their prescription medication. Canadians, their Doctors, and Pharmacists, can use RxISK to automatically generate a report that can be filed with Health Canada.

RxISK — Patients’ megaphone to help change drug safety

RxISK.org allows users to enter the name of a prescription drug and see the side effects that have been reported to the FDA since 2004, Health Canada since 1965, as well as to RxISK, for more than 35,000 drug names from 103 countries. The data is presented in tables, tag clouds, heat maps, and interactive graphs, showing what’s happening with other people taking the same drug around the world.

Users can then select the effect(s) they are experiencing and click on Report a Drug Side Effect to complete a report. They get a personalized RxISK Report linking their symptoms and meds, which they can take to their doctor or pharmacist to facilitate a better treatment conversation. This will also add their anonymized experience to the RxISK database so that others can benefit from this information.

About Data Based Medicine Americas Ltd.

RxISK.org is owned and operated by Data Based Medicine Americas Ltd. (DBM), based in Toronto, Canada. DBM’s founders have international reputations in early drug-side-effect detection and risk mitigation, pharmacovigilance, and patient-centered care. Although drug side effects are known to be a leading cause of death and disability, less than 5% of serious drug side effects are reported. DBM’s mission is to capture this missing data directly from patients through RxISK.org’s free drug side effect reporting tool and use this data to help make medicines safer for all of us.

Media contact

David Carmichael
david.carmichael@RxISK.org
+1 (647) 799-3792