Prevalence and profile of patients on antipsychotics in a hospital in southern Brazil

Aims: To evaluate the prevalence and the profile of inpatients prescribed antipsychotics. Methods: This was a cross-sectional study which evaluated patients admitted to Hospital Nossa Senhora da Conceição (HNSC), in Tubarão, State of Santa Catarina, Brazil, in 2013, who were prescribed antipsychotic drugs. All the data were collected from electronic medical records. Patients were evaluated according to their sociodemographic characteristics, type of antipsychotic drug prescribed, and clinical diagnosis (ICD 10). Results: Out of 125,670 patients admitted to HNSC in 2013, 1,559 received some kind of antipsychotic. The mean age of the patients was 50.34 years (SD=22.89). There was no variation in the prevalence of antipsychotic drug prescription between male and female patients, but the frequency of these prescriptions increased with age. Conventional antipsychotics were the most commonly prescribed ones, among which haloperidol was prescribed to 852 (54.7%) patients. Among the major diagnoses, anxiety disorders were the most prevalent ones, detected in 131 (6.3%) patients. Considering only the diagnoses of mental or behavioral disorders and including secondary diagnoses, anxiety disorders were observed in 233 (14.9%) patients. A total of 470 (30.1%) patients on antipsychotics had been diagnosed at least once with mental or behavioral disorders. Conclusions: The prevalence of antipsychotic drug use was 1.24% among the inpatients, and haloperidol was the most widely prescribed drug. The diagnosis of anxiety disorders was the most frequent one, but most patients who received antipsychotics had not been diagnosed with any psychiatric disorder, and eventually received them for other reasons.