A study on prescribing pattern and drug utilization among depressed patients in a tertiary care teaching hospital

Background: Drug utilization is defined as the marketting, distribution, prescribing and use of drugs in society. Various factors like quality, quantity, and cost of drugs plays an important role in selection of drug therapy. Hence we wanted to observe that drug utilization and prescribing pattern of antidepressants.Methods: A prospective observational study were conducted in a psychiatric department at RMMCH for a period of 6 months from November 2019 to April 2020. Sixty patients were enrolled and analysed to study the pattern and the world health organisation (WHO) prescribing indicators.Results: From 60 prescriptions, the most widely prescribed antidepressant drug escitalopram 21 (42%) as a combination drug citalinforte 30 (50%), linotril 21 (42%) lorazepam 12 (20%), haloperidol 6 (10%) and quitipin 3 (5%). Most commonly, depression was seen in age group between 31-40 years and males were more to depression than females. Most drugs were prescribed under brand names (55%) than generic drugs (45%). Monotherapy was the preferred drug pattern for the mild depression followed by dual therapy and triple therapy for moderate and severe depression respectively. The number of drugs which were prescribed from the WHO and national list of essential medicine (NLEM) was haloperidol (10%) and escitalopram (85%) respectively.Conclusions: Escitalopram was the commonly prescribed drug for depression followed by lorazepam, linotril and haloperidol. Monotherapy was most preferred, because of increased medication adherence, low ADRs, minimum cost and lesser drug interactions compared to other therapies.