Incidence of Potential Drug–Drug Interactions in Cardiac Patients in a Tertiary Care Hospital

INTRODUCTION: Drug Interaction is desirable or undesirable pharmacological effect of drugs interacting with other drugs, with endogenous physiologic chemical agents, with components of the diet, and with chemicals used in diagnostic tests or the results of such tests.An interaction can either increase or decrease the effectiveness and/or the side effects of a drug, or it can create a new side effect not previously seen before. Drug interactions may make the drug less effective, cause unexpected side effects or increase the action of a particular drug. Some drug interactions can even be harmful. Therefore, reading the label every time before using a nonprescription or prescription drug and taking the time to learn about drug interactions may be useful. The probability of interactions increases with the number of drugs taken. The high rate of prescribed drugs in elderly patients (65-year-old patients take an average of 5 drugs) increases the likelihood of drug interactions and thus the risk that drugs itself can be the cause of hospitalization. AIM OF THE STUDY: To Assess the potential drug-drug interactions among hospitalized patients in cardiac departments in tertiary care hospitals. OBJECTIVES: 1. To identify prevalence of potential drug-drug interactions, in cardiology department. 2. To identify the types and severity of pDDIs. 3. To make list of most common pDDIs in the hospitalized cardiac patients and to determine the risk factors associated with pDDIs in cardiology department. METHODOLOGY: Study design: • It is a prospective observational study. Study site: • The research work was conducted at tertiary care hospital, Erode, Erode district, Tamil Nadu. Study period: • 6 Months. Inclusion criteria: • Hospitalized cardiac patients. • Age groups above 18 years. • Prescriptions with two or more drugs prescribed during the hospitalization were only selected for the study. Exclusion criteria: • Out patients. • Ayurveda, siddha, and other prescriptions involving alternative system of medicine. • Age group less than 18 years. • Prescription with less than 2 drugs prescribed . Source of data: The data were collected from case sheets of hospitalized patients and direct patient interview from cardiac department. CONCLUSION: Our study concluded that the overall incidence of pDDIs was very high in the Department of Cardiology. The pDDIs were found to be more in males compared to females, it was found that incidence of pDDIs was associated with old age, polypharmacy and increased lengths of hospital stay. The majority of interactions were pharmacodynamic in nature, having major severity. The most of the common pDDIs were betwwen aspirin and clopidogrelnd followed by sspirin and Enalapril. The development of such data base in hospitals may help for the surveillance of pDDIs in hospitalized cardiac patients. The physicians should be aware of interactions among those drugs while prescribing for patients and thorough monitoring should be required for the patient safety by the implementation of admonitory guidelines and computer-based screening, which might help to prevent potentially harmful drug interactions