Drug Utilization Evaluation of HMG-COA Reductase Inhibitors in a Tertiary Care Teaching Hospital

Abstract

Drug utilization evaluation (DUE) is an essential component of pharmacoepidemiology, it describes the extent, nature and determinants of drug exposure. It is an ongoing, authorised and systematic quality improvement process, which is designed to review drug use and prescribing patterns, provide feedback of results to clinicians and health care provider. In this context, DUE of HMG-COA reductase inhibitors, the drug of choice for hypercholesterolemia and diseases pertaining to cardiovascular system was studied at MICU, ICCU in a tertiary care teaching hospital. A total of 150 patients were studied over six months period on DUE this includes number of statins, its dose, frequency, duration of treatment and indications. In our study, male genders were more in both ICCU (67.65%) and MICU (56.1%). Subsequently, rational use of Atorvastatin was found to be more in male patients. Further among HMG COA reductase inhibitors, Atorvastatin was the most prescribed statin in our study period. In addition to this, hypertension accounts as a major distributing risk factor (21%) secondary to patient age (37.7%). Overall, our study demonstrated the importance of DUE and DUE for HMG-COA reductase inhibitors in ICCU and MICU to validate rational use of drugs for minimizing the adverse drug reactions and better treatment outcome.