Ruzieh M, Moroi MK, Aboujamous NM, et al. - Researchers evaluated the relative risk of adverse events of amiodarone vs placebo in this meta-analysis of placebo-controlled trials. They analyzed evidence from 43 randomized trials involving 11,395 patients (5,792 randomized to amiodarone and 5,603 to placebo). In the amiodarone group vs placebo, a higher incident rate of adverse events per 10,000 person-years was observed for pulmonary (129 vs 74; relative risk (RR) 1.77), thyroid (201 vs 42; RR 4.44), hepatic (54 vs 25; RR 2.27), cardiac (771 vs 450; RR 1.94), neurological (140 vs 76; RR 1.93), and skin (81 vs 23; RR 1.99) adverse events. No link of low-dose amiodarone with statistically significant rise in pulmonary adverse events was found but low-dose amiodarone was found to be related to thyroid and liver adverse events. Overall, a higher probability of experiencing adverse events related to amiodarone vs placebo was observed. However, a low overall rate of adverse events was reported and a rare occurrence of severe adverse events was documented.