Natural health product use in Canada: patterns of use and the risk of interactions with pharmaceuticals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
National surveys in the U.S. have estimated that 12-14% of the population use Natural Health Products (NHPs). The extent to which NHP users are at risk for clinically significant adverse interactions with drugs is unclear. To evaluate this, patterns of NHP use in Canada were assessed using the 2000–01 National Population Health Survey (>11,000 respondents). Drug-NHP combinations were screened for interactions cited in the literature. 9.6% of Canadians used at least one NHP within the two days prior to being surveyed. NHPs were combined with a drug in 57% of users. Potential drug-NHP interactions were identified in 28% of combination users, or 1.5% of the adult Canadian population. Potential interactions were most common amongst persons using cardiovascular or anti-diabetic drugs. The clinical significance of interacting combinations were classified as: Major 25%, Moderate 7%, Minor 21%, Non-Clinical 47%. The major interactions consisted mostly of potential bleeding complications, relating to the combined use of drugs and herbs where each had anti-platelet activity. Although drug-NHP interactions may not appear to be a major cause for concern in the general population, the combined use of drugs and NHPs is common. Therefore health care providers and consumers alike must remain vigilant. A robust mechanism for spontaneous reporting of NHP-related adverse events and interactions is required and studies that focus on observed clinical consequences would be beneficial. Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics (2004) 75, P28–P28; doi: 10.1016/j.clpt.2003.11.104
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".