Terapevt Arkh
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In the modern world, there is a rapid advance in the design and clinical introduction of a huge number of drugs that are able to cure a patient or to improve his/her health status on the one hand and to cause significant harm to his/her health on the other. Polypragmasy is the desire to enhance the efficiency of treatment and to help the patient recover from all developed diseases inevitably leads to the use of a large number of medications. ⋯ Currently, the fight against polypragmasy is one of the important tasks in rendering medical care to elderly and senile patients since it is a major risk factor of adverse drug reactions in this category of people. To minimize polypragmasy in elderly patients, it is necessary to use current methods for analyzing each prescription of a drug (the index of rational drug prescribing; an anticholinergic burden scale) and those for optimizing pharmacotherapy with the use of restrictive lists (Beers criteria, STOPP/START criteria) that will be able to reduce the number of errors in the administration of drugs and to maximize the efficiency and safety of pharmacotherapy.
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Primary immunodeficiencies (PIDs) are a group of congenital diseases of the immune system, which numbers more than 230 nosological entities associated with lost, decreased, or wrong function of its one or several components. Due to the common misconception that these are extremely rare diseases that occur only in children and lead to their death at an early age, PIDs are frequently ruled out by physicians of related specialties from the range of differential diagnosis. The most common forms of PIDs, such as humoral immunity defects, common variable immune deficiency, X-linked agammaglobulinemia, selective IgA deficiency, etc., are milder than other forms of PID, enabling patients to attain their adult age, and may even manifest in adulthood. ⋯ Thus, a therapist and a pulmonologist are mostly the first doctors who begin to treat these patients and play a key role in their fate, since only timely diagnosis and initiation of adequate therapy can preserve not only the patient's life, but also its quality, avoiding irreversible complications. Chest computed tomography changes play a large role in diagnosis. These are not specific for PID; however, there are a number of characteristic signs that permit this diagnosis to be presumed.