Pharmacological Action Terms
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Most chemical and drug MeSH headings and Supplementary Concept Records (SCRs) are assigned one or more headings that describe the pharmacological action(s) (PA) of the substance.
- Since 1996, NLM indexers add the appropriate pharmacological action MeSH heading as well as the specific chemical MeSH heading to a citation when the action of the chemical is being discussed in the article.
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Example: |
Here are the pharmacological actions established for the MeSH Heading, Aspirin: |
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| MeSH Heading Pharmacological Action Pharmacological Action Pharmacological Action Pharmacological Action |
Aspirin Anti-Inflammatory Agents, Non-Steroidal Cyclooxygenase Inhibitors Fibrinolytic Agents Platelet Aggregation Inhibitors |
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- An article indexed since 1996 that discusses aspirin used as an anti-inflammatory agent is indexed with:
Aspirin
Anti-Inflammatory Agents, Non-Steroidal - An article indexed since 1996 that discusses aspirin used to inhibit blood clotting is indexed with:
Aspirin
Platelet Aggregation Inhibitors
- To search for articles indexed since 1996 about a particular action of a substance, search the substance term AND the Pharmacological Action as a MeSH heading.
Example:
aspirin [mh] AND fibrinolytic agents [mh]
Pharmacological Action Lists
In addition to their use as MeSH headings for indexing, pharmacological action terms have separate records in the MeSH database that list the substances that are assigned to that action:
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Type the Pharmacological Action term in MeSH Database search box.
Click on term labeled [Pharmacological Action]. |
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The Full format displays the substance terms that have been assigned the Pharmacological Action term, Food Preservatives: |
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Food Preservatives [Pharmacological Action]
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- Use of a term with the Pharmacologic Action search tag [pa] instructs PubMed to OR together terms from a list made up of a PA term and the drug/substance terms known to have that action.
- MeSH terms on the list are searched with the no explode specification, [mh:noexp], so as not to include narrower terms that might not share the pharmacological action.
- Use this search method when you want to include retrieval for all substance terms from the pharmacological action list.
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Example: |
beverages [mh] AND food preservatives [pa] |
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Remember, to search for articles about one particular action of a substance, search the Pharmacological Action as a MeSH heading, so as not to include all of the other actions of that substance. Retrieval of citations indexed before 1996 is likely to be incomplete.
Note: If you enter a MeSH term that happens to be a PA term without using a search tag, PubMed will search the term as [mh] OR [pa] OR [tw].
