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I note in the medical literature the increasing use of invented short phrases to describe drugs and drug classes. For example, in the June 23 issue of the ARCHIVES, Crouse et al¹ repeatedly refer to "reductase inhibitor" in their article dealing with the actions of pravastatin and lovastatin. These drugs are inhibitors of -hydroxy--methylglutaryl coenzyme A reductase (accepted abbreviation HMG-CoA reductase). It is inaccurate and inappropriate to use the truncated phrase "reductase inhibitor" to characterize these drugs because there are many reductase enzymes in human biochemistry. Moreover, there are other reductase inhibitors, such as finasteride, a 5-reductase inhibitor, which is completely unrelated to lovastatin and pravastatin.

I believe editors should insist on the proper designation of drugs and drug classes and discourage the introduction of unapproved, shorthand descriptions. These are uninformative and give no insight as to the content of the article or the mechanisms of action. (Crouse . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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Reductase Inhibitor Monotherapy and Stroke Prevention
John Robert Crouse, III, Robert Patrick Byington, Helena Maria Hoen, and Curt Daniel Furberg
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