Detection and analysis of potential drug-drug interactions among patients admitted to the cardiac care unit in a tertiary care hospital

OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to estimate how prevalent potential drug-drug interactions (pDDIs) were in patients with car-diovascular diseases who were hospitalized for more than 24 hours, and to determine the risk factors associated with these pDDIs. PATIENTS AND METHODS: A prospective observational study was conducted on patients admitted to the cardiac care unit in a tertiary care hospital. We included two hundred medical re-cords of cardiovascular disease patients who were prescribed more than one drug. These med-ical records were analyzed for pDDIs using the Micromedex drug interaction checker database. Data were analyzed using Descriptive statistics. Chi-square test and the Pearson correlation co-efficient were applied. RESULTS: PDDIs were prevalent in 95% of the analyzed medical records, with at least one detected pDDI per record. Within the 200 med-ical records, 430 potentially interacting drug pairs were identified, with the majority result-ing in moderate and major interactions. As-pirin/clopidogrel (111), furosemide/aspirin (89), enoxaparin/clopidogrel (89) and Lisinopril/aspi-rin (60) were the most common interacting pairs. Whereas, aspirin, heparin, clopidogrel, furose-mide, ranitidine and Lisinopril were the most fre-quently implicated drugs in DDIs. CONCLUSIONS: PDDIs were common among hospitalized cardiovascular patients. PDDIs were associated with age and number of drugs pre-scribed. The routine integration of an online drug interactions screening tool may improve the abil-ity of pharmacists to identify cardiac patients at higher risk of potential drug interactions and con-duct appropriate interventions thereafter.