Prevalence of drug interactions in hospitalized patients of the internal medicine service of a general hospital of México
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15381/anales.v82i3.21176Keywords:
drug interactions, polypharmacy, pharmacovigilance, hospitalization, internal medicineAbstract
Introduction. The joint prescription of several medications favors the occurrence of drug interactions, reducing the expected effect of the drug, and also favors the appearance of unexpected side effects. Objective. Document the prevalence of drug interactions in patients hospitalized in an internal medicine department. Methods. Observational, cross-sectional, retrospective study. It analyzed the drug prescriptions using the drugs.com® “Interactions Checker” tool to detect possible drug interactions found in the clinical records of 118 patients hospitalized in an internal medicine department of a public hospital in Mexico. Results. 78% of patients presented at least one drug interaction; 459 interactions were identified in total with a mean of 4 interactions per patient. 75% were classified as moderate, 13.5% mild, and 11.5% severe. Omeprazole had the highest number of interactions, and the most frequent interaction was furosemide + omeprazole. There was a significant relationship between drug interactions and the number of drugs prescribed (p <0.001). Conclusions. There is a high prevalence of possible drug interactions in the study sample, which should be considered when performing a rational prescription process, thereby ensuring the risk-benefit ratio to obtain a far-reaching positive impact on the patients’ health.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2021 Anales de la Facultad de Medicina
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Those authors who have publications with this magazine accept the following terms:
- Authors will retain their copyrights and guarantee the journal the right of first publication of their work, which will be simultaneously subject to Creative Commons Attribution License that allows third parties to share the work as long as its author and its first publication this magazine are indicated.
- Authors may adopt other non-exclusive licensing agreements for the distribution of the version of the published work (eg, deposit it in an institutional electronic file or publish it in a monographic volume) provided that the initial publication in this magazine is indicated.
- Authors are allowed and recommended to disseminate their work over the Internet (eg: in institutional telematic archives or on their website) before and during the submission process, which It can produce interesting exchanges and increase quotes from the published work. (See El efecto del acceso abierto ).
