ADR Monitoring of Hypertensive Patients in General Medicine Department

Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) to anti-hypertensive agents are common and can lead to noncompliance or even discontinuation of therapy. There is paucity of such data in the Indian context. We deemed it worthwhile to assess the suspected ADR profile of anti-hypertensive drugs in an ambulatory setting in a public teaching hospital. A longitudinal observational study was conducted in the outpatient department (OPD) of the concerned unit. Twenty consecutive patients per day irrespective of their hypertensive diagnosis were screened for suspected ADRs 2 days in a week over 6 months. Adverse event history medication history and other relevant details were captured in a format as adopted. We screened 2000 patients (68.69% males median age 38 years) of whose 429 were suspected of having at least one ADR; 84 cases had insufficient evidence about causality and were excluded from further analysis. Thus 17.25% (95% confidence interval: 15.59-18.91%) of our study population reported ADRs with at least “possible” causality. Of 352 events recorded 327 (92.90%) were “probable” and the rest “possible”.