PREVALENCE OF POLYPHARMACY AND DRUG TO DRUG INTERACTIONS IN A TERTIARY CARE TEACHING HOSPITAL

Abstract

Drugs are the most common medical interventions for betterment of the patients but they are fatal too. Inappropriate prescription and using of multiple medications can lead to morbidity and mortality. Polypharmacy is an important factor for occurrence of drug related problems like adverse drug reactions and drug-drug interactions, especially in elderly and ICU treated patients. Concomitant use of multiple medications associated with increased risk of hospitalization, increase in economic burden to patient and can potentially leadsto therapeutic failure. The study was aimed to assess the prevalence of polypharmacy and drug-drug interactions. The study was carried out in a 500 bedded tertiary care teaching hospital for a period of four months. About 940 prescriptions were screened for the study, in this male were 50.95 % (n = 479) and female 49.04 % (n = 461). About 51.06 % (n = 480) patients had major poly pharmacy followed by 22.97 % (n = 216) patients with minor polypharmacy and 25.95 % (n = 244) patients with non-poly pharmacy. In present study, majority of thepatients had respiratory followed by cardiovascular diseases. There were 512 (54.46 %) prescriptions which had drug-drug interactions and 420 (45.53 %) prescriptions had no drug-drug interaction. Out of 512 prescriptions there were 734 drug-drug interactions among them 16.75 % (n = 123) were major, 41.82 % (n = 307) were moderate and 41.41 % (n = 304) were minor drug-drug interactions. Poly pharmacy has a very high prevalence among hospitalized patients especially in ICU, resulting in more drug interactions. Physicians should prescribe a rationale combination and pharmacist should provide the pharmaceutical health care to improve the quality of patients.