London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Drug-induced tachycardia and cardiac arrhythmia, potentially leading to sudden cardiac death, are serious side effects of some drugs. It has historically been difficult to predict which drugs may result in serious side effects to patients' heart rhythms and this has resulted in a number of antipsychotic, antihistaminic and anti-infective drugs being withdrawn from the market, or restricted in use.

The Pharmacovigilance Working Party of the European Medicines Agency has called for more information on the subject, leading to the creation of the ARITMO project. The project, involving researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the UK, will use health care and surveillance systems to assess the safety of these three categories of drug. The Project aims to analyse the arrhythmic potential of three specific classes of drugs: antipsychotics, anti-infectives and antihistaminics, which total more than 250 compounds.

The ARITMO Project involves an international network which will create a common protocol database, allowing healthcare professionals to study one of the largest collections of data available and to analyse information on the association between drug use and adverse effects from the health care records of more than 27 million people across Europe. It also has the potential to examine risks arising from differences in prescription patterns between Northern and Southern Europe.

Mariam Molokhia, Senior Lecturer in Genetic Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, says, "LSHTM is Britain's national school of public health. It is an internationally recognized centre of excellence in epidemiology and biostatistics, and one of the highest-rated research institutions in the UK.

The research group has considerable experience in pharmaco-epidemiology, computational methods for analysing large, complex datasets, genetic epidemiology, experience with genome wide association studies and evidence synthesis, ideally suited to projects of this nature."

The sharing of knowledge between all the organisations involved in the ARITMO Project will allow health professionals to assess the risks against the benefits of drugs. The database will assign each drug a risk/benefit score, which will allow for more informed treatment and decision making when prescribing drugs.