Prevalence of Potential Drug-Drug Interactions in the Intensive Care Unit of a Tertiary Care Hospital: A Cross-Sectional Study

Abstract

Objective: To analyze the various Potential Drug-Drug Interactions in ICU patients with the ultimate goal of raising awareness among clinicians on safe medication usage. Materials and Methods: This was a Cross-sectional study conducted at the K.S. Hegde charitable hospital. The medical records of the patients admitted to the ICU of the hospital from January 2017 to June 2017 formed material for the study, were analyzed using the database from Lexicomp ® Solutions android mobile application for Potential Drug-Drug Interactions. Results: Among the 176 patients,81.39% had Potential Drug-Drug Interactions, with cardiovascular drugs (22.6%) being the majority group followed by respiratory drugs (17. 97%). Among these 73.2% of the interactions were clinically relevant with the majority being moderate (72.26%) in severity with fair (72.6%) documentation and belonging to Category C (61.080%) in risk rating. The pharmacodynamics type of interactions was more (59.31%) than pharmacokinetic type (36.13%). Conclusion: The high prevalence of Potential Drug-Drug in the ICU setting emphasizes the need for effective medication management and pharmacological consultation to reduce the adverse effect and improve the therapeutic outcome in these patients. Key words: Potential Drug-Drug Interactions, Severity, Documentation, Risk rating.