Project 173110

Drug therapy is a major part of healthcare for children. While drugs are given to treat, relieve symptoms and cure disease, drugs may also cause harm. Children deserve safe medications that do not harm them with side effects. Studying drug safety in children is very challenging, and the sickest children often receive drugs that have been incompletely tested. Kidney failure is an important unwanted side effect that can occur with severe disease, and can be made worse by drugs. Our data shows kidney failure occurs in 12% of ICU-days. Children with kidney failure are at significantly increased risk of death, and survivors stay longer in the ICU. This research will find out which medications are contributing to kidney failure in a large group of critically ill children (half of those in Ontario). We will combine information from 6 databases to study the effects of drugs on kidney function. The successful outcome of this research will include identifying the drugs associated with greatest amounts of kidney failure. Better understanding about drugs that are toxic to kidneys may allow these drugs to be avoided, or used in different ways to reduce kidney failure and improve the outcomes of critically ill children.