how do companies know side effects to some meds?

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It often says “might result to heart failure” and really bad stuff like that but how to they know, it’s obviously different on rats than humans and they can’t test on people. How do they know?

In: Biology

3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

I work in a medical department that tests treatments for a number of neurological conditions. Before drugs hit the market, they go through a number of [phases](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phases_of_clinical_research) of testing. Early phases are used to determine things like dosing, how quickly the drug is metabolized, obvious safety problems etc. Later phases are used to determine how effective the drug is at addressing the problem. At each step, the research team is required to monitor for possible side effects. These side effects need to be reported to the drug company and the IRB (the research ethics board in most American universities). In many cases, we don’t actually know for sure that these side effects were in fact caused by the drugs. But if they occur reasonably frequently, and we don’t have a good reason to think the drug was not the culprit, they will be included in a list of possible side effects.

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