Three years ago, Johnson & Johnson changed the name of its Alzheimer's drug Reminyl because doctors and pharmacists were confusing it with the diabetes medication Amaryl. Mix-ups were linked to two deaths.
Changing the name of a drug already on the market is unusual, but the case highlights a growing problem facing the drug industry, doctors, pharmacists and patients—drug names that look or sound so much alike they can lead to medication errors.
"This is a very urgent problem," said Diane Cousins of U.S. Pharmacopeia, the official standard-setting authority for prescription and over-the-counter medicines. "The number of reports of similar-named drugs is increasing, and the number of different products implicated in medication errors is increasing."The Food and Drug Administration is preparing to change the way it reviews and approves drug names in hopes of improving safety and streamlining the process.
The agency rejects 35 percent to 40 percent of the names proposed by drugmakers, but data show the system is badly flawed.
According to U.S. Pharmacopeia, nearly 1,500 brand-name and generic drugs have been implicated in medication errors because their names looked or sounded like another drug. The non-profit organization recently compiled 3,170 pairs of similarly named drugs, nearly double the count from a 2004 survey.
The drug most commonly confused with others, according to U.S. Pharmacopeia: Cefazolin, an antibiotic. It has been confused with 15 other drugs, with such names as Cephalexin, Ceftriaxone, Cefoxitin and Cefotaxime.
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