Polipharmacy and Drug Interactions in Elderly Patients with Metabolic Diseases

Metabolic disease is a disease that is associated with increasing age such as hypertension, diabetes mellitus, dyslipidemia and obesity. Such diseases are treated with polypharmacy therapy that can cause increased risk of drug interactions. This study was conducted using a restropective method using the medical records of elderly patients with metabolic diseases in outpatient unit of H. Adam Malik General Hospital Medan. A total of 328 samples were included in the inclusion criteria data showed that the number of drug-drug interactions that occur quite high at 78.96%. The pattern of drug interaction mechanism that most frequently occur is pharmacokinetic (63.6%) and the highest severity was moderate (69.8%). This study shown a correlation between the number of interactions with a number of drugs (r= 0.728; p= 0.0001), and the number of interactions with a number of diagnoses (r= 0.264; p= 0.0001)