A questionnaire for the clinical assessment of veterinary adverse drug reactions

Abstract

Despite widespread occurrence of adverse drug reactions (ADRs), their clinical identification has been a nonreproductible act of unspecified subjective judgment. Adequate criteria have not been available for diagnostic decisions about the cause of an observed clinical manifestation. To improve scientific precision in diagnosis of ADRs, the ADR questionnaire has been developed to rank the probability of linking a drug to a suspected clinical manifestation. The questionnaire provides a scoring system for six axes of decision strategy: previous general experience with the drug, alternative etiologic candidates, timing of events, drug levels and evidence of overdose, dechallenges and rechallenges. The sum of the scores is partitioned to rate the candidate ADR as definite, probable, or unlikely.