How studying Anxiety, Irritability and Anhedonia – Do you care about medication?
Dr Stingl is professor and director of the institute of clinical pharmacology at the university hospital of RWTH Aachen since 2019. From 2012-2019, she was head of research and vice president of the German drug regulatory authority, BfArM. Her research mostly focuses on Personalized Medicine and patient risk profiles for adverse drug events and therapeutic failure. She pioneered the systematic development of personalized dose adjustments promoting the way of Pharmacogenetic information in drug labels. She is involved in many European projects, and is coordinator of a EraPerMed project on Artificial intelligence for personalised medicine in depression. J Stingl has authored more than 278 publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals, has been cited more than 12,000 times with an average citation of 32 per article and an H-index of 57 (ISI web of science, Aug 2023). Dr Stingl was recipient of the Utrecht Award for Pharmaceutical Research in 2009 and awarded with the Leon I. Goldberg Young Investigator Award of the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics (ASCPT) in 2010. Dr Stingl was member of the former Pharmacogenomics Working Party (PGWP) and now serves as expert for the European Medicines Agency (EMA). Since 2019, she is member of the gene diagnostic committee in Germany. Since 2004 she is extraordinary member of the Drug Commission of the German Medical Association (AKDAE).
In the aging population, the number of medicines taken daily is increasing more and more, and in principle it can be assumed that every third person of retirement age takes more than five medicines at the same time. Drug-drug interactions and many other aspects related to polypharmacy can lead to adverse outcomes with serious adverse drug reactions.
Many adverse drug reactions resemble the symptoms observed in complex diseases such as depression, neurodegenerative disorders or cardiovascular diseases and can therefore be hidden under the guise of multimorbidity, especially in older people. Deciphering the burden of adverse drug reactions in multisymptomatic health conditions can help not only to better identify side effects in patients, but also to prevent and avoid them.
Practicable treatment recommendations already exist for pharmacogenetic profiles, and a recent multicentre study in Europe has shown that pharmacogenetically guided therapy has the potential to reduce adverse drug reactions by about one third.
Documentation and correct analysis of medication therefore holds great potential to effectively reduce the burden of disease, especially in older people.