Drug use profile in outpatient children and adolescents in different Italian regions

Abstract

BackgroundLarge differences exist in the prevalence rate of drugs prescribed to children and adolescents between and within countries. The aim of this study was to evaluate child and adolescent drug prescription patterns in Italy in an extra-hospital setting at the regional and Local Health Unit (LHU) levels.MethodsData sources were three regional prescription databases. Data concerning the year 2008 were evaluated. A total of 3.3 million children and adolescents were included. Drug prevalence and prescription rates were evaluated at the regional and LHU levels. The correlation between mean latitude, average annual income, hospitalisation rate, number of paediatricians per 1,000 resident children, and prevalence rate was evaluated by LHU using a linear multiple regression analysis.ResultsLarge differences were found across Italian regions and LHUs. The mean prevalence rate was 56.4% (95% CI 56.3-56.5%; 51.2-65.4% among regions) and, at the LHU level, ranged from 43.1% to 70.0% (higher in the South). A total of 878 drugs were prescribed, 175 of which were shared by all LHUs. Amoxicillin clavulanate was the most used drug in all regions and in 31 of 33 LHUs. Amoxicillin was the drug with the highest variability in use between LHUs (9.1-52.1% of treated children). An inverse correlation was found between prevalence rate and both latitude (p < 0.0001) and average annual income (p = 0.0002).ConclusionsThe use of drugs in children and adolescents is higher in southern Italy and is inversely related to latitude and average annual income. More efforts should be devoted to informing physicians, patients and policy makers in order to plan effective initiatives to improve the situation.

A 7-Years Active Pharmacovigilance Study of Adverse Drug Reactions Causing Children Admission to a Pediatric Emergency Department in Sicily

“…Concerning the therapeutic substances involved in ADRs, our results confirm previously reported data Piovani et al, 2013;Nogueira Guerra et al, 2015;Ferrajolo et al, 2019). In fact, vaccines were the drug class involved in ADRs occurrence, especially in infants.…”

Utilization of self-medication and prescription drugs among 15-year-old children from the German GINIplus birth cohort

“…Prescription drugs were found to be utilized by 15% of the Finnish children within an observation period of 2 days . In Denmark, Italy, and the Netherlands, 38–57% of the adolescents used at least one prescription drug during the last year . In Spain, 31.6% of the children older than 10 years took a medicinal product (Rx and OTC drugs together) within a period of 2 weeks, which is quite similar to the corresponding prevalence in our study (41%) considering use within the last 4 weeks.…”

Antibiotics to outpatients in Norway—Assessing effect of latitude and municipality population size using quantile regression in a cross‐sectional study

“…11,33,34 Secondly, the geographical effects on consumption within countries vary, and it is difficult to obtain predictors for this variation. 4 The North-South differences found in Italy 35 and the east-west gradient in Germany 4 are comparable to the latitude gradient in Norway. The German, Italian, and present Norwegian studies use different analytical approaches.…”