Abstract

Evaluation of Prescribing Pattern of Antihypertensive Drugs in a Tertiary Care Hospital

Author(s): Mohammad Arief, Harika B, Bonthu Satyanarayana, Shaik Wajid Pasha, Nagakanyaka Devi Paladugu, Shaik Irfan Pasha, Deepthi Poloju and Swapna Pokkula

The prescribing pattern of antihypertensive drugs by different physicians is not in compliance with that of the standard guidelines given by WHO/JNC-7. If the patient factors associated with hypertension like age, sex, the presence or absence of co-morbid diseases are not taken into consideration while prescribing the drugs then the final BP control remains unsatisfactory. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the prescribing pattern, to determine the factors associated with the treatment of the disease. It is an observational, prospective, non-interventional study in which 400 prescriptions were collected during december-2010 to july-2011 in a tertiary care hospital. As monotherapy ACE-inhibitors (38.25%) were the most commonly prescribed antihypertensive followed by calcium channel blockers (19.25%), diuretics (13.25%). Among combination therapy oftenly 2 drug combinations were prescribed, the most common combination was ACE-inh + CCB (5%), followed by beta-blocker+CCB (3.5%). The main limitation of this study was that all the prescriptions were collected from inpatient from a single hospital and it may not be a representative of prescribing pattern across the city. In this study it was observed that the ACE-inhibitors are the most commonly prescribed monotherapy agents (38.25%) and their prescribing pattern was in consistent with the global trends. Thiazides and the combination drugs were underutilized in this study, despite robustic evidence to support their use had led to increased burden on the patients. Two drug combinations were oftenly prescribed rather than three or four drugs