[fibogann]

Hi friends,

Recently I have been researching into drugs and environmental agents that have been identified as causing aplastic anemia, and like to quote from this medical paper entitled: "Epidemilogy of Aplastic Anemia - a prospective multicenter study" which was presented by several research university hospitals in Spain, as I thought the results will be useful to most of us, especially in the event we can request alternative prescritptions to those drugs or agents commonly prescribed without any thought to its relevance as an AA causing agent when we are sick or ill.

"Exposure to drugs and environmental agents

Out of the 235 cases with exposure data, 67 cases (28.5%) had been exposed to drugs or toxic agents.

Forty-nine (20.8%) cases had been exposed to the following drugs which have been reported to be associated with aplastic anemia:8 allopurinol (n=9), indomethacin (n=9), gold salts (n=9), sulfonamides (n=9), butazones (n=6), carbamazepine (n=5), ticlopidine (n=4), chloramphenicol (n=3), penicillamine (n=3), methimazole (n=2) and clopidogrel (n=2).

In addition, 21 (8.9%) cases had been exposed to toxic agents: insecticides (n=8), benzene (n=6), and other solvents (n=10) (http://www.icf.uab.es/aplasticanaemia)."

I underlined carbamazepine because this appears to be prescribed commonly for epilepsy and bipolar disorder and perhaps it is good for us to be alert to its use.

This paper was accepted for publication in Dec 2007 and made use of data from France, Spain and Thailand.

Regards,

Peter