Many people take multiple drugs to treat a variety of illnesses. People with Type 2 diabetes, for example, often have other conditions, such such as depression, heart failure, a previous heart attack, chronic kidney disease, atrial fibrillation, COPD, rheumatoid arthritis, dementia, or high blood pressure. This means that several other medications besides their diabetes drugs will need to be taken. As the number of medicines increases, the probability that a person will take two prescribed drugs that may interact with one another increases. In one study, the authors identified 133 potentially serious possible drug interactions for Type 2 diabetes, of which 25 (19 percent) involved one of the four drugs recommended as first-line treatments for all or nearly all patients.
Not all potential drug interactions result in a bad outcome, but drug interactions contribute to an increased risk of an adverse event occurring. In fact, up to 7 percent of people who are admitted to hospitals end up there because of an adverse drug reaction.
With all of the drugs on the market today, how many drug interactions are possible? The answer is quite a few. Fortunately, while there are a lot of potential drug interactions, not all of them result in adverse drug reactions. Why this is so is not well understood but may include underreported or unrecognized adverse drug events by the people taking them or their physicians, people simply not taking their medicines consistently, individual differences in tolerance of drug effects, and individual variations in the blood levels of any of the potential interacting drugs.
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.. Article BY MARK T. MARINO, MD | UPDATED JULY 19, 2018..