An alarm system of carbamazepine‐induced toxic effects highly associated with HLA‐B*1502 allele.

An alarm system of carbamazepine-induced toxic effects highly associated with HLA-B*1502 allele Carbamazepine is widely used in epilepsy, trigeminal neuralgia, and bipolar disorder, but if it causes severe cutaneous adverse reactions including Steven-Johnson syndrome (SJS) or toxic epidermal necrolysis (TEN), and the mortality rate is as high as 30%.1 Because of the death of patient taking carbamazepine due to this serious adverse drug reaction in our hospital, we read the article "Carbamazepine-induced Toxic Effects and HLA-B1502* Screening in Taiwan" by Chen et al, and learned that this toxic reaction was strongly correlated with the HLA-B*1502 allele, and compared with other ethnic groups, this genotype is the highest proportion in Asian population.2 Therefore, this article recommended that Asian patients should undergo HLA-B*1502 genetic screening before taking carbamazepine to avoid serious adverse drug reactions caused by this drug. Therefore, we, located in Southeast Asia-Taiwan, are motivated to get actively involved in building a computer-based alarm system for carbamazepine and HLA-B*1502 allele cross matching. [Extracted from the article]