In her blog “Discovering Biology in a Digital World“, Sandra Porter discusses a cool feature in PubMed which offers links to patient drug information about the drugs that are discussed in that particular article. I decided to try it out! For instance, I searched “cervical cancer vaccine”[tiab] and clicked on the “review” tab to see all review articles (2 out of 25 total) indexed by PubMed which have the exact phrase “cervical cancer vaccine in the title or abstract.

I then chose the paper published in Annual Review of Medicine, “Appropriate use of cancer vaccine” published by Zimet, Shew, and Khan (the other article would work, too).

On the result page for this paper, on the lower right portion of the page, you will find a link to drug information from Gardasil from the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists.

I decided to try another search for a specific drug that has been in the news lately, Ambien. Using the same approach, I entered ambien[tiab] into the PubMed search box and retrieved 20 hits:

When an individual record is chosen, you receive drug information as discussed above:

and you can receive drug information about all drugs discussed in the chosen article:

Interestingly, if you look above, there is something different about the results page, a link to “Comparing Newer Drugs for Insomnia” in PubMed Clinical Q&A, summaries of systematic reviews and answers to clinical questions.

the “Comparing Newer Drugs for Insomnia” entry is seen here:

Further reading:

• I encourage you to read Dr. Porter’s blog entry, Drug information for ordinary people in PubMed, and spend some time looking around her site. I’ve found some really interesting information treasures there!
• Drugs, Supplements, and Herbal Information from MedlinePlus
• PubMed Clinical Q&A from the NCBI Bookshelf