Pharmaco-surveillance of Cuban medicines in national medical journals

Introduction: publishing in the national medical reviews the adverse reactions observed in medicines patented in Cuba allows the Cuban professionals a better access to the information; the magnitude of this activity is not very well known. Objective: identifying articles on pharmaco-surveillance of the medicines patented in Cuba published in national medical journals and describing some of their characteristics. Method: cross-sectional, descriptive, observational study. We found articles published up to 2012 and indexed at the electronic library Scielo-Cuba, with the terms pharmaco-surveillance, security, adverse reactions, adverse events or undesirable effects in the fields title or matter. We excluded those that were not results of investigations or case reports. We examined variables like medicine object, made design, kind of surveillance, if at least one of the authors is the medicine producer, journal title and year of publication. Results: we identified 23 articles; 47,8 % referred the pharmaco-surveillance on several vaccines, 73,9 % dealt with case series and 26,1 % were about clinical assays; 91,3 % were post-commercialization studies. In 68, 9 % of them, at least one of the authors was the medicine producer. 52,2 % were published in the period 2000-2005 and 30,5 % of them in the Revista Cubana de Farmacia (Cuban Journal of Pharmacy). Conclusions: the number of articles found was scarce, even for the vaccines. The publication in national medical journals of the pharmaco-surveillance studies of the medicines patented in Cuba should be increased. Certain considerations should be taken into account for improving the published information, as a better way to generalize their results.