SideEffective Blog

Yes, painkillers are generally liked!  After all,  you are already in pain, so pain cannot be side effect .  But Hydrocodone tops all drugs in our SE score ranking with 50% less side effects than reported in all hundreds of thousands of reviews which we have collected from numerous sites.

Others on the list of least side effective – Xanax, Prozac and Ativan!

We have just introduced a new measure of how “side effective” a medication is. This applies only to drugs with sufficiently large number of reviews – so you will not see it for each drug. But if you look at xanax for example, you will see “27% less sideffective than average drug” just below the name of the drug. The process of calculation is explained upon hovering on the score. We take top side effects for this drug and see how much more frequent they are in reviews for that drug as compared to the general frequency in overall corpus of reviews. Thus, for xanax, its top side effects are less frequent in xanax reviews than they are in all reviews. This is very good!

On the other hand, the Depo-provera is 726% more sideeffective than average drug. Pravachol’s score is also pretty bad…410%, so is Remeron’s 166%.

In our last post we have named Prednisone as most “side effective” – at least it looked to us that way. However, its score is just 149%. We will soon publish the list of the drugs with highest (means really lowest!) scores. Of course, it is just math and statistics, you should ask your doctor!-

Prednisone is our first candidate to top the list of the most side effective medications.

Prednisone is in a class of medications called corticosteroids. It is used to treat low levels of corticosteroids by replacing steroids that are produced naturally by the body. It is used to treat other conditions by reducing swelling and redness and by changing the way the immune system works.

Weight increase, moodiness and insomnia are the top side effects associated with Prednisone and all of them with the X-factor > 2, that is occurring at least twice as often in prednisone reviews than in the entire database of patient reviews.

Accoriding to http://www.sideeffective.com/drug/prednisone/, here are the top side effects for prednisone and frequencies of their occurrence in the entire body of patient reviews for prednisone:

weight increase 753 9.05%
moodiness 367 4.41%
insomnia 344 4.13%
depression 198 2.38%
anxiety 183 2.20%

No, it’s not that X-factor with Simon Cowell! Our own X-factor tells us how much more often a side effect is likely to occur for a medication in comparison to the frequency in the whole body of all patient reviews. For example, an X-factor of 3.45x means that the side effect is 3.45 more likely to occur for a given drug (than in the entire population of several hundred thousands of reviews which we have in our database).

Most people do not want to gain weight.  Eating  less is probably a good idea. Unfortunately, some drugs may carry the weight increase as a “heavy” price tag for their usage.

What are the highest X-factor medications for weight gain?

Antidepressants, antipsychotic and  anti seizure medications dominate that list . However, all are beaten to the finish line by a ….female hormone. It is Depo-provera that “boasts” the highest X-factor from them all with the whopping 5x! The runner ups include Zyprexa with 4.84x and Remeron (popular antdepressant) with 3.63x. Zoloft, the front runner among antidepressants in terms of popularity, pales in comparison having the X-factor of 0.95. Thus it is *less* likely to gain weight as a side effect with Zoloft than of any random medication. So, if switching from Zoloft to Remeron helps your depression that’s great – but be prepared for extra pounds….

http://www.sideeffective.com/effect/Anxiety/