Drug fever

ABSTRACT

Drugs have been estimated to the cause of 10-15% of adverse events in hospitalized patients. Drug fever as the only manifestation or the most prominent clinical characteristics of an adverse reaction occurs in 3-5% of patients. Considering drugs as a cause of fever of unknown origin is important from clinical viewpoint. Drug fever is a febrile response coinciding temporally with the administration of a drug, subsides once the causative drug is disvontinued, and other probable causes of fever such as infection, malignancy, thromboembolic disease, cerebrovascular accidents, collagen vascular diseases, acute gout, surgery, and trauma have been ruled out by physical examinations and paraclinical investigations. A wide range of agents could induce fever by different mechanisms. Antibiotics have been considered as the most common offending agents among different drug classes causing fever. Antibiotics are associated with about one-third of drug-related fever episodes. Among antibiotics, drug fever has been mostly reported with beta-lactams, sulfonamides, and nitrofurantion. The sole effective approach to manage drug fever is to discontinue the offending agents[S]