Patterns of Drug Therapy among Diabetic Hypertensive Patients with Other Complications

Objectives: There are many variations in prescribing patterns of Diabetes mellitus with hypertension which requires lifelong treatment as enormously increased the burden of chronic diseases and needs much care while choosing drugs. In a tertiary care centre, prescribing pattern are powerful tools to ascertain the role of drugs in society. Hence, there is a need for appropriate, safe, effective and economical study to find out the patterns of drug therapy among diabetic hypertensive patients with other complications. Methods: Retrospective, randomized and non-interventional study design was conducted from April 2012 to September 2012 at a 600 bedded multispecialty tertiary care teaching hospital in south India.The collected data are thoroughly analysed and prescriptions were checked for appropriateness. For easy sorting all data obtained were entered into Microsoft Excel 2000 and cross-checked for accuracy. The data collected were analysed to obtain averages, percentages and standard deviations. The data were grouped on the bases of age, gender, fasting blood glucose, blood pressure, co morbidities, various classes of drugs and analysed for significance. Results: Patterns of drug therapy among Diabetic hypertensive patients with other complications was observed in 117 subjects, out of which males are more affected than females in the age group of 50-60 years. The most common drug administered for Diabetes was Metformin whereas for hypertension, Telmisartan was administered. There was a positive relationship between fasting blood glucose and systolic blood pressure. Conclusion: Lacuna in the present prescribing pattern is underutilization of diuretics. Further studies from time to time are required in drug utilization pattern and standard treatment guidelines to be circulated among practicing physicians. Our study was done for a short period of time and the number of patients studied was low. Hence, similar studies covering large number of patients are needed to confirm our findings. 4 College of Health Sciences, Department of Pharmacy, Mizan Tepi University, Mizan Teferi, Ethiopia, Malla Reddy College of Pharmacy, Dhulapally, Secunderabad. Deccan School of Pharmacy, Kanchanbagh, Hyderabad Email: [email protected]