Abstract
Background: Hypertension is one of the leading cause among the most of the cardiovascular diseases worldwide. Many clinical trials were conducted and number of guidelines was published regarding hypertension treatment. Whereas the prescribing patterns of these medicines doesn’t comply with the standard guidelines given by JNC-8. Many factors plays a key role during prescribing of medicines such as patient age, sex, occupation and blood pressure range which is major factor to be considered initially. So, all these factors and recommended guidelines should be linked up to prescribe the appropriate medicine to the patient according to his condition. If these factors were not taken into considerations before treatment then it remains unsatisfactory. Objective: The purpose of the study was to evaluate the prescribing patterns of antihypertensives in outpatients. And to evaluate whether the provided treatment comply with guidelines and is it satisfactory or not. Methods: It is an Observational, Prospective, Non-Interventional study. The study was conducted in outpatient department of a tertiary care hospital, Erode district. It was conducted for a period of six months and the prescriptions were collected during March-2014 to August-2014. The age group taken under study was 31-90years and size of the study population was 250 hypertensive patients. Results: Our research team found that commonly prescribed antihypertensives were monotherapy (74.8%) followed by two drug combination therapy (21.2%) whereas least prescribed was three drug combination therapy (04%). Under monotherapy calcium channel blockers (15.2%) were highly prescribed followed by β-blockers (14%) and loop diuretics (12%). Combination therapy consist of two antihypertensives as a co-formulation and most prescribed --blockers + loop diuretics (4.4%). Under three drug combination therapy most prescribed class of antihypertensives were ß-blockers + angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors + calcium channel blockers and ß-blockers + calcium channel blockers + loop diuretics comprises of (1.2%) followed by ß-blockers + calcium channel blockers + α1- blockers and ß-blockers + angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors + aldosterone antagonistscomprises of (0.8%) of total therapy. Conclusion: The study reported that overall highly prescribed class of antihypertensives were β-blockers (38.4%) followed by calcium channel blockers (37.6%). aldosterone antagonist and three drug combination therapy was under prescribed in this study. Hereby approaching to the final conclusion the prescribing pattern doesn’t comply with the provided JNC-8guidelines.
