Investigation of polypharmacy and potential drug-drug interactions in a group of hospitalized pediatric patients: a single-center study

Aims: Polypharmacy involves the use of multiple medications to manage one or more clinical conditions. This study aimed to determine the prevalence of polypharmacy and potential drug-drug interactions during hospitalizations in childhood and to investigate the nature of common interactions. Methods: Data for this retrospective cross-sectional observational study were obtained from the hospital database records of pediatric patients admitted to the pediatric department of a university hospital during the first six months of 2020. A total of 601 pediatric prescriptions from 877 hospitalizations involving 2620 medications were examined for drug-drug interactions using the drugs.com/interaction checker tool. Results: Of the evaluated 601 patients, 48.1% were female and 51.9% were male children. The mean age of the hospitalized patients was 4.78±5.2 years, ranging from 0 to 18 years, with a median age of 2 years. The mean length of the hospital stay was 5.5 (min 1-max 56) days. The mean number of prescribed medications per child was 4.38±2.4 (min-max 1-16). Potential interactions were identified in 49.1% of the prescriptions. The prescription rate of antimicrobial treatment for hospitalized patients was 86%, and this group had a high occurrence of major drug-drug interactions (p