Avaliação da utilização e segurança de medicamentos em pacientes idosos internados em um hospital universitário

Abstract

The increase in the elderly population contributes to the higher prevalence of numerous and varied pathologies, whose pharmacological treatments generally include features that lead to the practice of polypharmacy, a factor that has a major impact on the safety of elderly patients, given that polypharmacy is largely responsible for the adverse drug reactions and drug interactions. The objective was to evaluate the safety and use of prescription medications in elderly patients aged 60 years and admitted to the University Hospital João de Barros Barreto, Universidade Federal do Pará. This is a cross-sectional, observational study of descriptive character and exploratory data collection to analysis of medical records was performed, the data were processed using the SPSS 20.0 statistical program. The results showed that the mean age was 71.9 years, 52.7 % women, elderly women showed older than male patients. The hospitalization obtained an average of 21.7 days, average of diagnoses per patient was 2.6. The principal diagnosis of hospitalization was cardiovascular diseases (20.3%). The average number of drugs prescribed per admission was 6.8. The most commonly used drugs were part of the digestive and metabolic system (32.4%), the prevalence of potentially inappropriate prescribing of medications evaluated during hospitalization was 11.2 %, higher among women (58.8%), the potentially inappropriate medication prescriptions was more often in Butylscopolamine (25.2%). In regard to potential drug interactions, were identified in 65.5% of prescriptions, with an average of 8.6 per patient, medication interactions are involved in most of the cardiovascular system (38.6%), most of the interactions potential drug had moderate severity (75.3 %), potential pharmacokinetic interactions of action accounted for 65.4% of prescriptions and hypotension and hyperkalemia together accounted for 30.7% of the RAM , the management strategy was the most frequent monitoring signs and symptoms (65.7%) and with respect to monitoring the blood pressure amounted to 21.8%. In this study, the factors related to polypharmacy were length of hospital stay, number of diagnoses, drug interaction and the amount of inappropriate medications and were seen as a determinant in the occurrence of polypharmacy clinical variables: "number of diagnoses "and" length of stay ". Given these results, there is a need to adopt strategies for the optimization of pharmacotherapy provided to the elderly patient.