Abstract
Pharmacoepidemiologic studies, carried out in Europe and the Americas, have found varying rates of potential drug-drug interactions, ranging from 5% to 80%. Risk factors that have showed closer association with the presence of potential drug-drug interactions in previous studies includes Polypharmacy, age, gender, clinical conditions, medications and the number of physicians that a patient visits. By applying computerized DDI screening programs research investigators can significantly improve the identification of potentially harmful DDIs, beyond what can be achieved with manual review alone and the main objective of the study is to assess the potential drug-drug interactions in prescriptions of patients with chronic diseases in community setting and to evaluate the severity of drug-drug interaction. Among 500 potential drug-drug interactions, majority of PDDIs were moderate in severity (n=354, 71%) followed by major PDDIs (n=126, 25.4%) and minor PDDIs (n=20, 4%). This finding was similar to that found in another study performed by Anna Chatsisvili et al in community pharmacies in Greece where majority of PDDIs were moderate in severity. PDDIs involving beta adrenergic blockers and oral hypoglycemic agent (glimepiride+metformin) were the highest recorded (22.4%) followed by beta blockers and dihydropyridine calcium channel blockers (10.6%), ACE inhibitors and thiazide diuretics (8.2%). Our research study was only observational study; as a result investigators could not be able to evaluate the health care outcomes of the patients which remains as one of the biggest limitations of this research study.
