Assessment of potential drug–drug interaction in stroke patients

Abstract

Objective: To assess the incidence and pattern of potential drug-drug interaction (pDDI) in hospitalized stroke patients. Methods: A retrospective study was carried out in a medical record from a tertiary care teaching hospital for a 4 mo period from November 2015-February 2016. The total of 200 prescriptions was analyzed during the study period. Results: A significant proportion of patients with pDDIs were males (61.5%) followed by females (38.5%). Among the 200 prescriptions, 179(89.5%) were confirmed with minimum one potential drug-drug interaction. Moreover, patients prescribed with more than 5 drugs developed a higher number of interactions. Based on severity scale, there were 125 major, 375 moderate and 128 minor interactions were observed. The pharmacodynamic interactions were 286 while the pharmacokinetic were 342. Conclusion: The study highlighted the pDDIs which were high in stroke patients greater than 40 y. pDDIs in prescriptions contained multi-drug therapy is a major concern as such interaction may lead to increased risk of hospitalization and higher health care cost. The majority of interactions were pharmacokinetic in nature, having moderate severity. In this study pDDIs mainly occurred between antihypertensive, anticoagulants and antiplatelet.