ABSTRACT
Background: Acne vulgaris is one of the most common dermatological disorder affecting the pilo sebaceous glands resulting in their blockage or inflammation. Symptoms of acne may include local erythema and tenderness and pain. Medication include benzoyl peroxide, retinoids, salicylic acid, alpha hydroxy acid, nicotinamide, azelaic acid, anti-seborrheic medications, hormonal treatment, anti-androgen medications and keratolytic soaps.Methods: About 166 patients who were treated for acne vulgaris were included into the study after taking the informed consent from the patients. This study was approved by the Institutional Ethics Committee. The demographic details of the patients with regards to their, age sex, weight, BMI were taken. The acne was medically diagnosed, and the grade was assessed.Results: Out of the 166 patients included into the study, 92 (55%) were females while 74 (45%) were males and the mean age was 25.4±1.6 of the patients belonged to the middle class. Of the patients, most of them were adolescents or less than 25 years of age (54.2%). 64 of the patients were between 26-45 years while only 12 were >45 years of age. A total of 521 drugs were prescribed. Of them, 37.6% were through the oral route and 62.4% were topical the most common prescribed drugs were antimicrobials, both topical and oral.Conclusions: The multidrug prescription in most of the cases can be rationalized if a drug monitoring system can be effectively put into place. This would not only reduce the number of drugs per prescription but also the cost of treatment.
ABSTRACT
<b>Introduction</b>: Dermatological disorders are one of the adverse events caused by cancer chemotherapy and are a dose-limiting factor for some anti-neoplastic agents. The severe symptoms associated with these disorders affect the patients’ quality of life (QOL). Early countermeasures for the onset of dermatological disorders associated with anti-neoplastic agent administration might be important.<br><b>Materials and Methods: </b>We analyzed the occurrences of dermatological disorders after administration of an anti-neoplastic agent in the Food and Drug Administration Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS), and compared the adverse event (AE) reporting ratio of the total reports. In addition, we studied the association between anti-neoplastic agents and dermatological disorders using cluster analysis. Reports for 15 anti-neoplastic agents (4 anti-neoplastic agents and 11 molecular target drugs) were analyzed.<br><b>Results: </b>After excluding duplicate data in FAERS, 6,157,897 reports were analyzed. The number of reports that showed a dermatological disorder was 534,934. The reporting ratio of hand-foot syndrome with sorafenib and capecitabine was 11.20% and 7.05%, respectively.<br><b>Conclusions: </b>We set the cluster number at six; cluster features obtained were as follows: (1) the reporting ratio of hand-foot syndrome was especially high, followed by the reporting ratio of rash, (2) the reporting ratio of rash and erythema was high. Similar anti-neoplastic agents may demonstrate similar occurrence tendencies of AEs and cluster features. Further studies are required to draw conclusions over these findings. Information services based on the feature of each cluster might be useful to improve patient QOL at the clinical site.