Maria Amparo Lopez Ruiz
Cardenal Herrera University, Spain
Title: Self-medication practices among parents who attend to a private pediatric clinic
Biography
Biography: Maria Amparo Lopez Ruiz
Abstract
Self-medication is a common practice and an important problem of public health between the pediatric patients. The total number of patients who attended to the Accident and Emergencies Department during 1 year (from February 2017 to February 2018) was 2388. A total of 1538 patients attended to the private pediatric clinic taking some medication before the visit. The majority of drugs consumed by these patients (self-medication provided by parents or caregivers of children) were pain-killers and antipyretics (64.8%), followed by drugs for the respiratory system (20.1%) and drugs for the digestive system (11.2%) and antibiotics in a minority form (3.9%). The 1538 self-medicated patients, 143 had some adverse drug reaction due to the medication they were taking; and 35 of these reactions were due to self-medication. The patients from 1 to 4 years were the most self-medicated group (65.1%), followed by the group of 5 to 14 years (22.8%) and those under one year (12.1%). Self-medication among pediatric patients is common; and the most often with pain-killers and antipyretics under dosing leading to ineffectiveness and adverse reactions that could be prevented with proper use of drugs. Regarding the analysis of the dosage of pain-killers and antipyretics: ibuprofen recorded 343 cases of under treatment (54.6%), 28 cases of overtreatment (4.9%) and 251 cases of correct dosing (40.5%). While paracetamol recorded 200 cases of under treatment (35.9%), 32 cases of overtreatment (5.8%) and 331 cases of correct dosing (58.3%). The most frequent adverse drug reactions observed with self-medication were: vomiting (77.3%), skin rashes (12.5%) and diarrhea (10.2%). None of the adverse drug reactions was serious, and could be solved without requiring hospital admission. Although it should be noted that such adverse reactions could have been avoided if they had not made an inappropriate use of the drugs, due in large part to their own lack of knowledge of the indications of the same.
