Drug–drug interactions among hospitalized elderly in patients at medical wards of Northwest Ethiopia’s Comprehensive Specialized Hospitals: A multicenter observational study

OBJECTIVE: Drug–drug interactions are of major concern due to links to untoward drug effects, hospitalizations, and serious health impacts. Elderly patients are more predisposed to drug interactions than younger patients. The present study aimed to find out the prevalence of drug–drug interactions at North West Ethiopian compressive specialized hospitals’ Internal Medicine wards. METHODS: From 30 April to 30 July 2021 GC, a multicenter prospective observational study was conducted at north Ethiopian specialized hospitals. Data was collected by using a structured questionnaire adapted from different literature and medical records at the North West Ethiopian Comprehensive Specialized Hospitals’ Internal Medicine wards during the study period. Thereafter checked the completeness of the collected data was checked drug–drug interactions by using Medscape. Epi data version 4.6.2 software was used as data clearance and STATA version 14.1 was used for further data analysis. RESULT: A total of 389 subjects participated in the study of which more than half (55.53%) of them were female with a mean (SD) age of 68.9 ± 7.46 years. A total of 641 drug–drug interactions were detected in this investigation of which, 225(35.1%) were major, 299(46.6%) were significant interactions, and 117(18.3%) were minor interactions. Hospital stay (AOR = 5.95 CI: 3.49–10.12), retire (AOR = 6.71 CI: 1.26–35.78), 5–9 drugs (AOR = 5.30 CI: 2.91–9.67) and more than 10 drugs (AOR = 8.03 CI: 2.47–26.07) were important risk factors for drug–drug interactions. CONCLUSION: The findings of this study suggest that drug–drug interactions were high among hospitalized elderly patients. The presence of polypharmacy, to be retired, and hospital stayed were all found to be strongly linked with drug–drug interactions.