#28 Catching black swans – François Montastruc

Drug Safety Matters

Serious and unexpected adverse drug reactions – the ‘black swans’ of pharmacovigilance – can place enormous strain on safety monitoring systems. Drawing examples from the COVID-19 pandemic, François Montastruc from Toulouse University Hospital explains how we can get better at dealing with the unpredictable.

Tune in to find out:

• What Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s ‘black swan’ theory has to do with pharmacovigilance
• What makes an adverse drug reaction a black, white, or grey swan
• Why flexibility and communication are key to patient safety

Want to know more?
Here are the research articles cited in the episode:

• Quality of reporting of adverse events in clinical trials of COVID-19 drugs: systematic review
• Psychiatric disorders and hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19: a VigiBase study
• Hepatic disorders with the use of remdesivir for COVID-19
• Serious bradycardia and remdesivir for COVID-19: a new safety concern
• Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine-induced cerebral venous thrombosis and thrombocytopaenia: a missed opportunity for a rapid return of experience
• Atypical thrombosis associated with VaxZevria® (AstraZeneca) vaccine: data from the French network of regional pharmacovigilance centres
• Teaching pharmacovigilance to French medical students during the COVID-19 pandemic: interest of distance learning clinical reasoning sessions

If you enjoyed this podcast, check out these related episodes from the Drug Safety Matters archive:

• Reforming pharmacovigilance education
• Lessons in pandemic pharmacovigilance
• Intuition in pharmacovigilance

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Chapters

1. #28 Catching black swans – François Montastruc (00:00:00)

2. Intro (00:00:15)

3. Black swan theory (00:01:59)

4. Relevance to pharmacovigilance (00:04:49)

5. Black swan events (00:08:33)

6. White swan events (00:10:51)

7. Grey swan events (00:13:53)

8. The pharmacovigilance 'oiseleur' (00:17:00)

9. Teaching bird-catching (00:19:48)

10. Collaboration is crucial (00:22:49)

11. Outro (00:25:56)