The drug safety concept has earned a lot of attention during the past decade due to the fact it plays a major role in patients health. Recent laws stress this concept should be included in the process of new medications approval and continued conduct of post- marketing drug evaluations.Benefit-risk assessment should be considered by all health care professionals when they need to give specific drugs to specific groups of patients. All drugs have side effects, but the extent of their impact and severity varies from mild to severe. Most of the side effects are predictable and mentioned in the leaflets for each drug. However, the serious problem is that some of the drug side effects are not previously known or have not been noticed, and the real risk here is whether they would exert a severe deleterious impact on the patients who are using them. Among the factors that may increase the severity of the side effect the type of medication and the type of patients using them are the most important.
The danger of effects of drugs is not limited to taking drugs during pregnancy, deleterious effects on the fetus may be experienced even if a medication is taken within a short period of time period before pregnancy. The incidence of side effects can be easily avoided by applying certain preventive measures on the part of the patient. One of these measures is full awareness and knowledge about the medications used, and this can be achieved by reading the leaflet including in the package of the drug, which usually contains all necessary information about the drug. Different medication can interact with each other and cause what is known as drug interactions, which can occur with most drug. Such interactions could occur at any stage while the drug is present in the body.