All medicines are drugs but not all drugs are medicines: pharmacoepidemiological approaches to assess the use of prescription/OTC medicines, herbs, dietary supplements and illicit drugs.

My PhD study programme has been focused on pharmacoepidemiologic topics. Pharmacoepidemiology applies epidemiologic reasoning, methods and knowledge to the study of the uses and effects, beneficial and harmful, of medications in a defined population. Pharmacoutilization studies, in particular, aim at collecting the prescriptive profile of the sample investigated. Beside risk/effectiveness evaluations or the compliance assessment to a treatment, drug intake may be a indirect clue of the healthiness of the studied population since it is the marker of a disease severe enough to require a medication. Data concerning the use of prescribed medications and over the counter (OTC) may also allow to evaluate potential risks of drug-drug interactions (DDI) which represents a particular concern especially in the elderly, where polypharmacy is extremely common. DDI may be represented by a pharmacokinetic or pharmacodynamic interference of drugs on each other, which can determine an impaired effectiveness or an increased toxicity and is one of the main causes of adverse drug reaction, being responsible for up to 23% of hospital admissions (Secoli 2010). In this context I have performed a pharmacoutilization study investigating the risk of potential DDI between treatment potentially used in dentistry and the prescribed medications/OTC used by outpatients attending a dental clinic. Moreover, pharmacoepidemiology surveys offer the possibility to investigate use and attitudes towards other agents such as dietary supplements (DS), herbal remedies (HR) and illicit substances such as doping. Indeed, the use of the these substances appears to be raising, thought studies in literature are quite scarce. Therefore, I decided to investigate the use, knowledge (benefits and risks) and attitudes towards these agents within sports. I have also deepened the herbal remedies topic HR performing an extensive review of the existing literature and followinf s muticenter study in the setting of multiple sclerosis.