Prescribing practices in psychiatric hospitals in Eastern Europe

Abstract

Older generation antipsychotics and antidepressants were used more frequently than in the countries of Western Europe. Psychotropic polypharmacy is a common practice. There is a need for adopting more evidence-based practice in psychiatric care in these countries.

Gender differences and psychotropic polypharmacy in psychiatric patients in Brazil: a cross-sectional analysis of the PESSOAS Project

“…A combined analysis of 28 studies involving 23,428 patients showed a mean of 2.47 (1.5 to 4.0) psychotropic medicines/institutionalized patient 31 . In recent studies this number is even higher (2.8) 28 , as was observed in our study (2.98).…”

“…Antipsychotics were the most prescribed medicines (37%) and the most commonly used combinations involved these agents, as observed in other studies 13,28,30 . However, antipsychotic polypharmacy is quite controversial in the literature.…”

“…Studies have shown that psychotropic polypharmacy among patients with psychiatric disorders varies from 10% to 93% 13,26,27,28,29,30 , in line with the psychotropic polypharmacy prevalence of 85.3% in our national sample. A trend of enhancing polypharmacy among psychiatric patients has been observed, with a decline in monotherapy strategy over the years from 47.8% in the 1970s, to 19.6% in the 1990s 31 .…”

Prescribing Patterns for Inpatients With Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders in a Psychiatric Hospital in Slovenia: Results of 16-Month Prospective, Non-Interventional Clinical Research

“…The crucial differences between previous research on the pharmacological medication of psychiatric inpatients and our research are as follows: the previous research examined only the patterns of psychotropic prescribing for inpatients with different psychiatric disorders, our research examined the prescribing patterns of all medications for inpatients with specific disorders coded as F20-F29, some of the previous research were carried out on the certain day and they were retrospective, our 16-month research was prospective, observational and non-interventional (Jordanova et al 2011, Rittmannsberger et al 1999. A limitation of this research is its monocentric character, nevertheless the number of included inpatients (N=311) was high enough to get representative data, especially for Slovenia.…”

Bir üniversite hastanesinde yatarak tedavi gören hastalarda çoklu ilaç kullanımı: Geriye dönük bir çalışma / Polypharmacy among inpatients of a university psychiatry clinic: a retrospective study

“…Mean number of medications per patient was found as 2.8. Among patients whom records were examined, it was found that 64.2% used three or more psychotropic medications (12). When numbers in different studies were analyzed, it can be said that these differences were due to population studied.…”