Abstract
This is the sixth edition of Ivan H. Stockley’s book, first published in 1981, and is an authoritative international compendium of drug interaction information. It is widely considered to be one of the most thorough and comprehensive databases for drug interactions available today. The book is well organized so that the reader can access the data in a variety of ways. The reader can access data by individual name or therapeutically or pharmacologically. There are 23 chapters, including an introductory chapter, which provides an overview of the general consideration of many of the common mechanisms of interaction. Chapters 2 through 23 are arranged by drug classification, with Chapter 24 providing almost 100 pages of miscellaneous drug interactions that did not fit into any of the proceeding chapters. The text of each chapter is organized in a series of alphabetically arranged drug-drug monographs. The monographs each have a common format, which includes the following five sections: abstract, clinical evidence, mechanism, importance and management, and references. Hence, the health care professional can quickly access a summary of the vital drug interaction information and can further delve into the details in the accompanying references. The author has utilized both British (Recommended International Non-proprietary Names [rINNs], British Approved Names [BANS]) and US Adopted Names (USAN) in the text as well as the index so that any English-speaking clinician can easily use the book.
The book has been updated since the fifth edition, which was published in 1999. Since the fifth edition, the book is no longer single-authored by Dr. Stockley. Pharmaceutical Press (the publishing arm of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain) has utilized an editorial team from the Society under the guidance of Dr. Stockley to revise and update this latest version of Stockley’s Drug Interaction. The sixth edition follows the previous editions in style and format by providing concise and verifiable data on drug-to-drug, drug-to-herb, drug-to-alcohol, and drug-to-food interactions that may be critical to the clinician. The sixth edition now contains approximately 3000 monographs incorporating over 13,000 total references. Many of the existing monographs have been reviewed and updated with current literature citations.
The book strives to answer a number of critical questions to assist the clinician:
Are the drugs prescribed known to interact? Is any possible interaction well documented or merely speculative? With known interactions, what is the degree of toxic interaction? Is the interaction common or rare? What is the degree of penetrance of the effects with different individuals? Can the drugs be accommodated in any way or must they be avoided in all occasions? Are there alternative effective and/or safer drugs available to the clinician?
Overall, the book is easy to use and provides a wealth of useful information for the clinician in health practice. The practicing clinician is warned of data based primarily on anecdotal, uncontrolled, or animal data alone. The Stockley team claims to have attempted to “filter out as much useless noise as possible” by avoiding the use of secondary references where available. The animal toxicological data are not presented in this book, because this is a reference for physicians and clinicians. Toxicologists will find the overview of the basic interaction mechanisms useful as well as the mechanisms section of the monographs; however, the lack of any animal data does limit the book’s usefulness as a pure toxicology text. Stockley’s Drug Interactions is a must have for any pharmacist and/or health care professional and, albeit for the lack of animal data, makes an excellent reference for the practicing toxicologist. This book is the sixth edition of a well-known and extremely thorough pharmaceutical text in which the data are well organized in a useful yet simplistic format. Each drug interaction is researched in detail, providing the reader with a reliable review of the state of knowledge of that particular interaction. The researcher who needs further details is provided with the references from which the summary was derived. This reference book is one that should be in every drug researcher’s library.