A Ten-year Report of Drug and Poison Information Center in Mashhad, Iran 2007-2017

The Mashhad drug and poison information center (MDPIC) was officially established in 2000 to provide up-to-date information on medications. The objective of this study is to provide an epidemiologic profile of drug inquiry and poisoning-related phone calls to MDPIC from 2007 to 2017. This article is a descriptive retrospective study in which all inquiries about drugs and poisoning cases received by MDPIC, from 1st January 2007 to 31st December 2017, were retrieved from its database for analysis. A total of 100997 cases were analyzed. The most frequent calls were from individuals in the age group of 18 to 60 years old (70.21%). The majority of callers were women (73.08%). The public made 95.11% of calls, and 4.89% were related to health care professionals. The queries were mainly related to therapeutic uses of drugs (24.03%), followed by adverse drug reactions (18.96%). Given that 99.23% of calls were related to drug information inquiries, the most common drugs questioned about were antimicrobial (12.3%) and vitamin and minerals (10.76%), whereas 0.77% of calls were about poisoning and the majority of them were due to drugs poisoning. Micromedex® was the most commonly used reference to answer the inquiries. This report shows an updated epidemiological evaluation on recorded calls in the drug and poison information center in Mashhad. Since there is no other similar report, this can provide valuable information on the trend of drug usage and may guide further strategies in giving proper information to public and health centers.