Journal of Heart and Cardiology Journal of Heart and Cardiology Journal of Heart and Cardiology Journal of Heart and Cardiology 2378-6914Ommega Online PublishersNew Jersey, USA94310.15436/2378-6914.16.030Research ArticleUsing the Stems of Drug Names to Simplify the Prescribing of Cardiovascular DrugsUsing the Stems of Drug Names to Simplify the Prescribing of Cardiovascular DrugsDavid M PatonDepartment of Pharmacology University of Auckland Auckland New ZealandEditor* E-mail: dmpaton38@yahoo.ca
The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
20161308201622JHC-16-RW-94323052016080820162016Creative Commons Attribution LicenseThis is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. nbsp emsp emsp In choosing a generic or official name for a drug the bodies responsible for these decisions follow a number of guidelines One of these is the use of stems that are reserved for drugs with particular mechanisms of action clinical use chemical structure etc In this article the usefulness of knowing stems is illustrated using the drugs chosen by the Eighth Joint National Committee JNC 8 as the drugs of first choice for the management of hypertension The drugs so selected form a limited number of groups identifiable by their stems Each of these groups has a common mechanism of action common actions on different organ systems common clinical uses and common unwanted effects Knowledge of the stems of different groups of drugs is unfortunately not always as useful as in these examples but does assist in identifying some important characteristic of that group thus making stems an important contributor to both undergraduate and postgraduate medical education 10