Kathleen Holloway and David Henry evaluate whether countries that report having implemented WHO essential medicines policies have higher quality use of medicines.

While a large part of the world's population faces the problems of underdiagnosis and undertreatment, it is apparent that a “modern epidemic” of overdiagnosis afflicts high-income countries, with tangible human and financial costs of the unnecessary management of overdiagnosed diseases. While there is ongoing debate about how to best describe the problem, narrowly defined, overdiagnosis occurs when increasingly sensitive tests identify abnormalities that are indolent, non-progressive, or regressive and that, if left untreated, will not cause symptoms or shorten an individual's life.

Patricia McGettigan and David Henry find that, although some non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) such as diclofenac are known to increase cardiovascular risk, diclofenac is included on 74 countries’ essential medicine lists and was the most commonly used NSAID in the 15 countries they evaluated.

Original Source

David Henry discusses a research article by Geoffrey Spurling and colleagues that examined the relationship between exposure to promotional material from pharmaceutical companies and the quality, quantity, and cost of prescribing.