An Overview of Various Scales Used in Causality Assessment of Adverse Drug Reactions

Abstract

Establishing a relationship of causality between the medications received and the events occurred utilizing causality assessment scale is much needed to reduce the occurrence of Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs) and to prevent exposure of patients towards additional drug hazards. Causality assessment can be defined as the determination of chance, whether a selected intervention is the root cause of the adverse event observed. The causality assessment is the responsibility of either a single expert or an established committee. As it is a common phenomenon of variable perception of knowledge and experience by each expert, there is a high possibility of disagreement and inter-individual variability on assessment. Many of the causality assessment methods have their advantages and disadvantages. However, no single scale has been adopted as standardized and considered for uniform acceptance.

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“…In our study, we observed an incidence of adverse drug reactions (ADRs) at a rate of 2.75%, constituting a significant portion, specifically 47.01%, of the total DRPs. This trend aligns with findings from two other studies, where they reported similar ADR incidences of 2.17% 19 and 1.82%, respectively 20,21 . There was an another study reported a lower incidence of 3.7% ADRs among hospitalized patients in India, highlighting the need to investigate the reasons for this discrepancy, including under-reporting and inadequate pharmacovigilance systems 22 .…”

Students’ Knowledge and Risk of Committing Medication Errors in Two Schools of Pharmacy in Nigeria

“…This is very important in ensuring safer health services, as 1-10% of medication errors identified in patient care are associated with patient harm [4]. There are different scales in assessing causality in adverse drug reactions, such that when that is introduced in the curriculum, the students may be better positioned to identify the adverse drug reactions errors [35].…”