It's estimated that 100, 000 Americans die each year because of adverse drug reactions (see: " America's Riskiest Drugs"), but that's no reason to dump the medicine box down the toilet.

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Andrew Husband, principle lecturer in pharmacy at the University of Sunderland and lead on the Gateshead study said allergies were a significant cause of avoidable adverse drug reactions among hospital in-patients each year.

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If pharmacogenomics can help to recruit those patients who should respond to the drug and rule out those who will have adverse reactions, it will rescue useful remedies that would otherwise have been discarded.

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It is often triggered by adverse reactions to drugs, but little is known about the safety of different drug combinations.

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