Seroxat Panorama watched by 4.4 million - produced only 1,374 e-mails !

An estimated 4.4m people recently watched “Secrets of Seroxat” (Panorama, BBC-TV), a 50-minute programme about paroxetine, an SSRI antidepressant for which UK general practitioners wrote an estimated 4.7m prescriptions in 2001. The programme attracted a record response, including some 65,000 telephone calls, 124,000 website hits, and 1,374 emails.We systematically analysed the contents of these emails, and in this paper consider how they might help clinicians and their patients, as well as providing an indispensable element in pharmacovigilance and post-marketing drug surveillance.

http://www.motkur.no/paroxetine.pdf

from

Paroxetine, Panorama and user reporting of

ADRs: Consumer intelligence matters in
clinical practice and post-marketing drug
surveillance


Charles Medawar a,∗, Andrew Herxheimer b, Andrew Bell c and Shelley Jofre c


a Social Audit Ltd., London, UK
bDIPEx Project, Department of Primary Health Care, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
c British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), London, UK