The drug-consuming patient and his drugs. II. The drugs.

The drug consumption pattern and patients' knowledge about their drugs have been studied in 506 patients, acutely admitted to hospital. The patients took a mean of 3.2 drugs before hospitalization, the majority of them being used for more than one year. Calculated on all 506 interviewed patients, women took more drugs than men, but among the 406 users there was no significant difference in the number of drugs taken by men or women. The number of drugs increases markedly with age. The drugs most commonly used were digoxin (30% of the patients), nitrazepam (19%), furosemide (18%), potassium (17%) and nitroglycerin (14%). Dosage reduction with advancing age was registered i.a. for digoxin. Judging from the number of adverse drug reactions (ADRs) and subjective side-effects, the dosage reduction should probably have been even greater. Twenty-six patients (5%) were admitted because of an ADR, another 10 (2%) with an ADR. For the majority of drugs (84%) the patients had some understanding of the expected effect, but knowledge about possible side-effects was reported for 26% of the drugs only.