prescribing pattern and drug indicators in patients visited by general practitioners and specialists in ardabil city of iran

drug is an important and strategic commodity and a basic need of the people in all countries. the aim of this study is to determine the drug use patterns and descriptive analysis of prescriptions of doctors in ardabil city of iran. a retrospective study was carried out on 2000 randomly-selected prescriptions. data were obtained on demographics, prescribing indexes and analyzed by descriptive statistical methods by spss software. of the 2000 prescriptions, 822 (41%) and 1178 (59%) were for men and women, respectively, by a female to male ratio of 1:0.69. the mean age of the patients was 31.6 ± 21.3 years, ranging from one to 91. 1306 (65.3%) of all prescriptions were for general practitioners and the rest for specialists. the average number of drugs per prescription was 3.58 ± 1.3, ranging from 1 to 9 drugs. dexamethasone (219, 24.7%) was the most frequently-prescribed medicine. results demonstrated that the average number of drugs per prescription and the rate of prescribing injectable drugs were more than world standards and it is necessary to reduce these indexes and irrational use of drugs through interfering with patients' belief and physicians' attitudes.