Prescription pattern of Anti-hypertensive drugs in a tertiary care hospital

Background: Elevated Blood pressure is one of the most important modifiable risk factors for cardiovascular diseases. Recently a number of newer and effective anti-hypertensive medications have come into practice. Therefore it is important to find out patient compliance, recent trends in prescribing anti-hypertensive medications and its effectiveness in upcoming medical practice. Objective: To evaluate the recent trends in prescribing anti hypertensive drugs, in outpatients in the Departments of General Medicine and Cardiology at a tertiary care hospital. Methods: The present study was a cross sectional observational study. This was conducted in the Departments of Cardiology and General Medicine, Pondicherry Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS), Puducherry. Adult patients diagnosed to have mild to severe systemic hypertension and on treatment without any other co morbid conditions of either sex attending the out patient clinic were included in the study. The study duration was three months with a sample size of 300 patients. The following data were obtained from their outpatient files: Demographic details, BP, drugs used to treat the elevated BP. The data will be presented as descriptive statistics. Results: Majority of patients were between the age groups of 41-60 years. Amongst them 84% of male patients and 61.90% of female patients had good control of BP with anti-hypertensive therapy. 71.70% of patients had their BP within the normal range with a single anti-hypertensive drug. The most commonly prescribed drug is calcium channel blockers followed by beta-blockers, ACE inhibitors, ARBs and diuretics. The most commonly used combination is calcium channel blocker with beta-blocker. Conclusion: The present study represents the current prescribing trend for anti-hypertensive agents. The use of single anti-hypertensive has been found to provide good control of blood pressure in majority of patients, but about 28% of patients required more than one drug for blood pressure control. Though the rate of usage of AR blockers and ACE inhibitors has been increasing, the Calcium channel blockers and ? blockers top the list in the most commonly prescribed anti-hypertensive agents.