WASHINGTON – Nearly 1,500 widely used drugs have names, alike to at least one other medication that they’ve already caused mix-ups, says a major study by the U.S. Pharmacopoeia.

Mixing up drug names, because they have similar names or looks, is one of the most common types of medical mistakes which can cause deadly results. Now new efforts are focusing to stop the confusion, and make patients aware of the expected risk.

”There are so many new drugs approved each year, this problem can only get worse,” warns USP vice president Diane Cousins.

According to estimation, 1.5 million Americans get harmed each year from various medication errors, and name mix-ups has 25 % share in them.

Hardly does a pharmaceutical company change a drug’s brand name after it hits the market, though it has happened twice since 2005. The Alzheimer’s drug Reminyl now is changed into Razadyne, after mix-ups, including two reported deaths, with the old diabetes drug Amaryl. The cholesterol pill Omacor is now named Lovaza, after mix-ups with blood-clotting Amicar.

Food and Drug Administration is preparing a program, which would put more responsibility to manufacturers to guard against name confusion. The goal is to spell out how to better test for potential mix-ups before companies take approval to sell their products.

Patients can also ask their doctors to write a prescription, this step would help them prevent errors, told the Institute for Safe Medication Practices.

“What they consider most important is to know, why the medication is used,” says Michael Cohen. “It would go a long way to interrupt a lot of these mix-ups.”

Write “for heart” next to “clonipine,” for example, and a pharmacist is less likely to grab similar-sounding gout pills colchicine.

But specialists are prompting more research on another solution that is writing drug names in an eye-catching mix of upper- and lower-case letters. Sometimes it helps but, it can rebound, warns Dr. Ruth S. Day. She found consumer of a cardiac medicine got even more confused when it was written NIFEdepine — because the change made them pronounce it “KNIFE-duh-peen” instead of “nie-FEH-duh-peen.”

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