What is your medicine's active substance sold as in another EU country?

Same substance, not the same product. A name listed here can come in a different strength, form or combination from yours. A pharmacist must confirm any substitute.

Try:

Example: Panodil, looked up for France

Panodil

Active substance: paracetamol. Authorised in Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.

In France, 27 brand names carry exactly paracetamol and nothing else, among them Doliprane, Dafalgan and Efferalgan. Type a name above to see the full list.

The lookup needs JavaScript. The list is also plain files: one per first letter of the substance under abroad/ (p.json holds paracetamol).

Names only. This page lists which brand names EMA's list gives for the same active substance(s) in each country. It has nothing on uses, doses, side effects or interactions, it does not compare products, and nothing here is medical advice. Ask a pharmacist or doctor about the medicine itself.

How the match works

Every brand in EMA's Article 57 list carries its active substance(s). A name is listed for your country only when its substances are exactly the same set as yours: paracetamol alone matches paracetamol alone, never paracetamol with caffeine or paracetamol with codeine. A combination matches only the same full combination: Brufen Plus (ibuprofen with codeine) finds Astefor in Spain and Nurofen Plus in Ireland, and no ibuprofen-only name.

The list gives the substance, not the product: one brand name can cover tablets, syrups and suppositories in several strengths, and the list does not say which of them a pharmacy stocks.

Reading a result

The product. A brand you type is looked up in EMA's Article 57 list. If several products start with that name and carry different substances (Panodil is paracetamol; Panodil Extra and Panodil-Duo are paracetamol with caffeine), each is offered as a button so you can pick the one on your pack. The exact name you typed is picked first.
Names in the country you chose. Every brand name authorised there whose substance set is exactly the same, in alphabetical order. For paracetamol alone that is 34 names in Spain (Gelocatil, Apiretal, Dolostop, Termalgin and others) and 27 in France (Doliprane, Dafalgan, Efferalgan, Panadol and others). Several of them are one brand in different forms: Dafalgan, Dafalgancaps and Dafalgantabs are all listed because the list names them separately.
Where it is authorised. Every country with at least one name for the same substance set, with the number of names in each. Tap one to switch to it.
Whole-EU names. A medicine authorised centrally by the European Commission is listed with EU rather than a country. Those names are shown apart from the country list, because the central authorisation covers every EU country and also Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway.
The WHO name and the US name. Each substance is shown as EMA's list writes it (salt word removed). Where ThisDrug's sourced table of names that differ by country holds it, the WHO International Nonproprietary Name (INN) and the US name are shown with their source: paracetamol is acetaminophen in the US, salbutamol is albuterol. Where no US name is held, the page says so and does not guess. Typing a US name such as acetaminophen looks up the INN it belongs to.
Salts that stay in the name. EMA's list sometimes keeps a salt as part of the substance, as in ibuprofen lysine. That is a different substance name, so it is a different set here and is not mixed with ibuprofen.

What this page cannot do

Only products in EMA's Article 57 list. Companies report each medicine they hold in an EU or EEA country to the European Medicines Agency; a product missing from that report is missing here, and so is anything sold only outside the EU and EEA (Switzerland, the rest of the United Kingdom, the US). Generic-named products are not indexed. In most countries many packs are sold under the substance's own name and a company name, such as Paracetamol Teva; the list leaves those out as brands (66,925 source rows), so a country with few names here may still have many such packs. Ask for the substance by its name. Names written in Greek or Cyrillic letters are not included, so Greece, Cyprus and Bulgaria are thin. Not a stock list. An authorisation says a product may be sold, not that a pharmacy has it. Not a substitute finder. The same substance in a different strength, form, release type or combination is a different product; only a pharmacist or doctor can say whether one can replace another. The list is dated: downloaded 2026-09-25.

Source and how the list was built

Under Article 57(2) of Regulation (EC) No 726/2004, every marketing-authorisation holder reports each medicine it holds in the EU or EEA to EMA. EMA publishes the result as the Article 57 product data spreadsheet on its public-data page. The copy used here was downloaded on 2026-09-25 and has 164,314 rows. ThisDrug's brand name lookup keeps three columns of it (product name, active substance, country) and reduces it to 42,952 brand names; company, contact and file-location columns are skipped and appear nowhere on this site.

This page turns that same list round. A script, tools/build-abroad.cjs, reads the committed brand files with no network access, writes each brand's substances in lower case, sorts them and joins them into one key, then groups the brand names by key and country. The 42,952 brand names fall into 7,956 distinct substance sets. The result is split by the first letter of the key into files under /data/abroad/; a lookup fetches only the file it needs, from this site. What you type stays in your browser.

Credit. Source: European Medicines Agency (EMA), Article 57 product data, downloaded 2026-09-25. EMA's legal notice (checked 2026-09-25) allows its information to be reproduced provided EMA is acknowledged as the source. WHO and US names: ThisDrug's names by country table, each pair with its own official source.