Publications by authors named "Don LeGatt"
Objectives: To investigate the rates and causality of adverse event(s) (AE) associated with natural health product (NHP) use, prescription drug use and concurrent NHP-drug use through active surveillance in community pharmacies.
Design: Cross-sectional study of screened patients.
Setting: 10 community pharmacies across Alberta and British Columbia, Canada from 14 January to 30 July 2011.
Article Synopsis
- - Many consumers take natural health products (NHPs) alongside prescription medications, but the safety of this combination is unclear due to underreported adverse events.
- - Pharmacists in a study actively screened patients for concurrent use of NHPs and prescription drugs, identifying that 39.7% of those surveyed used both, with a reported adverse event rate of 2.94%.
- - The study highlights that active surveillance is effective in discovering adverse events linked to NHP use, showing that it can yield valuable data for assessing safety, despite some challenges.
Introduction: Our main objective was to estimate smoking prevalence as well as sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), and negative predictive value (NPV) of self-reported smoking among pregnant women in Edmonton, Canada, at 15-16 weeks of gestation.
Methods: We used serum samples to assemble a cohort of pregnant women who underwent an optional second-trimester screening for chromosomal and developmental anomalies. We determined cotinine concentrations for 92 self-reported smokers (11% of the cohort) and for 285 self-reported nonsmoking mothers, using adapted urinary cotinine assay.