Cross-Allergy of Sulfonamide-Containing Drugs in Sulfonamide Allergic Patients: A Literature Review and Case Study

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to find out whether there are broad cross-reactivity between antibacterial and nonantibacterial sulfonamide agents, the method of the study contained two parts, one is literature research mainlyfrom PubMed database by using the MeSH terms (“Drug name” + allergy); (“Drug name” + hypersensitivity);(“Drug name” + cross-allergenicity) and (“Drug name + cross-reactivity), the search drugs included somecommonly seen medication such as carbonic anhydrase inhibitor, COX-2 inhibitor, loop diuretic, sulfonylurea,thiazide and certain antiviral drugs; the other parts of this thesis is to conduct a statistical review, we screen outpatients who have a previous allergic history of antimicrobial sulfonamides from hospital medical record systemduring Jan 1st, 2015 to Dec 31th, 2016, we did a descriptive statistics of general patients medical information,analyze the suspect cases which patients present potential allergic reaction after using non-antimicrobialsulfonamides agents. Result of literature research reveal there are no convincing evidences and research toconfirm there are bored allergenicity between non-antimicrobial sulfonamides and antimicrobial sulfonamide inthe aspects of chemical structure, immunological study, and large scale population study as well; Result ofhospital patient’s statistics found out there are only 3 suspected cases that the patients were having adverseeffect during their pharmacotherapy from 506 cases. However, we did not found any strong correlation of broadallergenicity between non-antimicrobial sulfonamides and antimicrobial sulfonamides from these suspectedcases. Conclusion: There is minimal evidence of cross-reactivity between the antimicrobial sulfonamides and thenon-antimicrobial sulfonamides. However, the non-antimicrobial sulfonamides are rarely implicated inhypersensitivity reactions as well, so it is impossible to say with certainty that cross-reactivity does not occur.