Jane Porter

DRUG-INDUCED GASTROINTESTINAL BLEEDING: Report from The Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance Program, Boston University Medical Center

Rates of drug-induced gastrointestinal bleeding were estimated from data on 16 646 consecutively monitored medical inpatients who had no known predisposing illness. Heparin, warfarin, ethacrynic acid, steroids, and aspirin-containing drugs were associated with gastrointestinal bleeding and were estimated to account for about two-thirds of such bleeds. Major gastrointestinal bleeding, defined as bleeding severe enough to require transfusion, occurred in only 57 patients (0.3%).

Oral Contraceptives and Nonfatal Stroke in Healthy Young Women

The Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance Program obtained medical histories on 29 premenopausal women with a discharge diagnosis of stroke. Of these women, 14 were otherwise healthy with no known predisposing illnesses. Eleven of the 14 patients were taking oral contraceptives just before admission compared with seven of 56 otherwise healthy control women (13%). The relative risk estimate for stroke among oral contraceptive users compared with nonusers is 26 (lower 90% one-sided confidence bound = 7.0). Cigarette smoking was only weakly associated with stroke in this group of women.

Lung cancer in young women.

A comparison was made between cigarette smoking histories of 31 women below age 50 years who had a diagnosis of lung cancer on hospital discharge and smoking histories of 124 women below age 50 years who had been hospitalized for other conditions. Of the women with lung cancer, 28 (90%) were current or former cigarette smokers; 72 (58%) of the comparison women were smokers. The relative risk estimate for lung cancer among smokers as compared with nonsmokers is 6.7, with 90% confidence limits of 4.0 and 11. Risk of lung cancer increased with the amount that the women smoked. The smokers with lung cancer had been smoking for longer periods than the smokers with other conditions. Assuming that the association is causal, cigarette smoking was responsible for about 77% of the lung cancer of young women in this survey.

Drug toxicity and hospitalization among lithium users

Among a cohort of 921 outpatients less than 65 years of age at Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound who took lithium during a 5-year period, lithium-associated toxicity leading to hospitalization was rare. In only one case (muscle fasciculation) was lithium directly implicated as the cause of hospital admission. In five cases described in detail (one case each of hyperparathyroidism, vasculitis, edema, brain stem infarction, and subarachnoid hemorrhage), an etiologic connection with lithium exposure was considered unlikely but could not be ruled out.