To describe rational drug prescribing in general practice for elderly patients, using patients age, sex, encounters and the occurrence of some predefined inappropriate drug prescribing, according to Beer's criteria, drug-drug interaction of common OTC drugs and WHO essential drug list. A retrospective study on rational drug prescribing patterns in geriatric patient was carried out using prescriptions issued to the geriatric patients, 65 years and above, attending the outpatient and inpatient department of various hospitals and clinics of Hyderabad. Of the 150 prescriptions consecutively selected, Anti diabetics (142, 15.58%) were the most commonly prescribed medicines with metformin being the most prescribed anti diabetic. The medications prescribed by generic names were 92 (10.08%). 40% of medicines were prescribed from the WHO essential drug list. 17 (11.3%) prescriptions had one or more potentially inappropriate medicines from Beer's criteria and in 16 (10.6%) prescriptions drugdrug interactions were ascertained according to drug -drug interactions of common OTC drugs. The drug prescribing pattern among the elderly is still suboptimal. Appropriate interventions are needed for both health care providers and patients alike.
The reality is a combination of perception, reconstruction, and interaction. Augmented Reality is the advancement that layer over consistent everyday existence which includes content based interface, voice-based interfaces, voicebased interface and guide based or gesture-based interfaces, so designing augmented reality application interfaces is a difficult task for the maker. Designing a user interface which is not only easy to use and easy to learn but its more interactive and selfexplanatory which have high perceived affordability, perceived usefulness, consistency and high discoverability so that the user could easily recognized and understand the design. For this purpose, a lot of interface design principles such as learnability, Affordance, Simplicity, Memorability, Feedback, Visibility, Flexibly and others are introduced but there no such principles which explain the most appropriate interface design principles for designing an Augmented Reality application interfaces. Therefore, the basic goal of introducing design principles for Augmented Reality application interfaces is to match the user efforts and the computer display ("plot user input onto computer output") using an appropriate interface action symbol ("metaphors") or to make that application easy to use, easy to understand and easy to discover. In this study by observing augmented reality system and interfaces, few of well-known design principle related to GUI ("user-centered design") are identified and through them, few issues are shown which can be determined through the design principles. With the help of multiple studies, our study suggests different interface design principles which make designing Augmented Reality application interface more easier and more helpful for the maker as these principles make the interface more interactive, learnable and more usable. To accomplish and test our finding, Pokémon Go, an Augmented Reality game, was selected and all the suggested principles are implemented and tested on its interface. From the results, our study concludes that our identified principles are most important principles while developing and testing any Augmented Reality application interface.
Objective:
The aim of the study was to examine the prescription pattern of antihypertensive drugs used in a secondary care hospital in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Methods:
It was a prospective, observational study carried out in 588 adult hypertensive patients presenting to medicine outpatient and inpatient departments of Dibba Hospital, Fujairah, UAE. The study was conducted for a period of 6 months from December 2017 to May 2018. Demographic and clinical data were collected from electronic patient case records and documented. Prescriptions were studied overall for drug use details and for specific types of antihypertensive drugs. The World Health Organization Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical/Defined Daily Dose methodology was further used to calculate utilization. Statistical analysis of data was performed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences 24.0.
Findings:
Of the 588 study participants, majority of the patients were on two-drug combination antihypertensive therapy (
n
= 210, 35.5%) followed by monotherapy (
n
= 188, 32.1%) and three-drug combination (
n
= 136, 23.1%). Calcium channel blockers were the most frequently (51%) prescribed class both in monotherapy and in combination therapy while angiotensin receptor blockers and angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors (55.9%) were the most preferred agents for monotherapy. Among individual antihypertensive drugs, amlodipine was prescribed the most (266 prescriptions), irrespective of monotherapy or combination therapy.
Conclusion:
Our study represents the current prescribing trends of antihypertensive drugs in a secondary care hospital in the UAE. The use of antihypertensive drugs largely conforms to international guidelines, but still, there is room for improvement in terms of rational drug utilization.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.