Vets’ Advice: Nexgard NOAH Product Information
Vets’ Advice: Nexgard NOAH Product Information
The Nexgard NOAH datasheet provides vets with essential prescribing information. This is important as there are actually three products grouped together under the Nexgard brand name - Nexgard Chewable Tablets for Dogs, Nexgard Spectra Chewable Tablets for Dogs, and Nexgard Combo spot-on for cats. All of these products provide flea and tick protection for the animals they are designed to treat, and each of these products has its own Nexgard NOAH datasheet.
Official information about Nexgard products
The Nexgard range of products are authorised veterinary medicines, which means that the company marketing them - in this case Boehringer Ingelheim Vetmedica - has authorisation (licence) from the veterinary medicines regulator (the Veterinary Medicines Directorate, or VMD) to market the products in Great Britain. Factual information from the marketing authorisation is summarised in a legal document called the Summary of Product Characteristics, or SPC. The SPCs of all authorised veterinary medicines are available freely to the public, and can be accessed via the VMD’s Product Information Database. The SPC is an important document because it defines the authorised uses and dosage of the product - its purpose is to help ensure the product is used effectively, safely, and for the authorised uses, and a company can only legally promote a medicine in line with the SPC.
What is a Nexgard NOAH datasheet?
The information contained within the Nexgard SPCs is reproduced in the Nexgard NOAH datasheets. These can be found online in a collection called the NOAH Compendium, with NOAH being a membership organisation which promotes the interests of veterinary pharmaceutical and other veterinary health companies. NOAH publishes the Compendium (and makes it available via an app) and companies often voluntarily add the information from their SPCs to the Compendium voluntarily. You will find a Nexgard NOAH datasheet for each of the Nexgard brands in the Compendium, and many people find that when looking for specific information on a product, the NOAH Compendium can often be more user friendly than the VMD’s Product Information offering. However, unlike the VMDs database (which contains the SPC of every authorised veterinary medicine), unfortunately the NOAH Compendium cannot be relied on to be a comprehensive source of official information on authorised veterinary medicines.
What is in a Nexgard NOAH datasheet?
In each Nexgard NOAH datasheet you will find the specific uses for which the product has been authorised. It is important for vets to be aware of these authorised uses, and also know when they are using the product outside the authorised uses (known as unauthorised, off-licence or off-label use) because this carries extra responsibility for the vet. In addition you will also find information about dosage, the type and frequency of known adverse effects, advice about use of the product in pregnant or lactating animals, and storage information.
What’s not in the Nexgard NOAH datasheet
While the Nexgard SPCs and Nexgard NOAH datasheets contain essential information about these medicines, often it’s useful to know a bit more. For instance, the meaning of certain phrases used to describe medicines - like the term ‘chewable’ for instance - aren't always obvious. Nexgard and Nexgard Spectra are labelled as chewable tablets, and some people think this means they are chewy, but in truth there is no such thing as a chewy veterinary medicine formulation. Adding to the ambiguity in this area, the term 'chewable' has no legal definition - unlike the term ‘palatable’ which does have a specific meaning.
Help with making sense of medicines
By getting to the bottom of the practical meaning of this type of language and explaining it to our subscribers, we help professionals make sense of medicines information, help to ensure that they can use the information available well, and put them in a position where they can make the best treatment choices for their patients. So if you're looking for more information of this type relating to other medicines, don't forget that in addition to this page on Nexgard products, the Veterinary Prescriber team have developed similar pieces of content covering Thyronorm, Solensia, and many other veterinary drugs too.
What if you want to compare products?
Sometimes there is a choice of different medicines available to treat an animal with a given condition. This is certainly true of parasiticide products like the Nexgard range - but SPCs and datasheets only contain information on a single product. To be able to compare several different products you need to gather together the information and critically analyse the data on each product. This is obviously time consuming work for a busy veterinary professional - but that's where we come in. Veterinary Prescriber does all of this donkey work for you and provides clear and practical advice on choosing products. We’ve done this for Nexgard Spectra and Nexgard Combo in All-in-one cat parasiticides and Preventing lungworm in dogs: which product. Further to this however you might also want to consult Veterinary Prescriber’s unique Parasiticide Guide, which can help with the overall choice of parasiticides for companion animals.
Finally, to read more about how we appraise and compare products, visit the About page on our website - or to subscribe (as an individual or as a practice) click here.