THE NAPOS DRUG DATABASE

We in the international porphyria community understand the need to pool our expertise for the benefit of our patients. The Norwegian Porphyria Centre (NAPOS) has designed a database which references much of the available information about the safety of drugs in porphyria and draws on the expertise of many of those with a porphyria interest, including ourselves. A major advantage of this database is that it is kept current, and therefore contains information about many more newer drugs than did the traditional lists. Of particular importance is that expert pharmacologists interrogate the pathways of drug metabolismfor each drug to determine the likelihood of its induction of the haem synthetic pathway. This allows us to make an informed guess as to whether it is likely to be safe or not, even when (as often happens) there is little or no actual experience with the drug in "real" porphyric patients.

We are in a process of corrrelating our own drug lists (as published on this site) with the NAPOS data, which is enabling us to expand our lists and to reclassify many drugs about which little was known previously. We continually update the lists on our site as we do so, so it is worth checking back from time to time for an updated list, particularly if you print it out for future use.

We have included a direct link to the NAPOS website in our site, so that you can choose to look up a drug directly if you wish. On the other hand, you may find out the way we classify and present our information suits you better, in which case you can continue to use our lists.

We gratefully acknowledge the important contribution made by the NAPOS group.

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