| Abstract [eng] |
Hypertension is a global risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD) as well as several other related diseases, thus contributing to the global burden of disease. CVD ranks high in terms of global prevalence. This study aims to provide a deeper understanding of antihypertensive drug usage for hypertensive and non-hypertensive disease treatment in Lithuania. There is limited amount of research done on cardiovascular diseases using electronic prescriptions as a data source. Furthermore, there is a lack of studies on tendencies of antihypertensive drug usage for hypertensive and non-hypertensive diseases. With this study it was important to asses how many antihypertensive drugs are prescribed for different health conditions in March 2022. Then the differences of prescribing antihypertencive drugs according to patients age and sex were evaluated. Also, the study overlooked which specialty health professionals prescribed antihypertensive drugs most frequently for the treatment of hypertension-related and non-hypertensive diseases. The collected data for this analysis in contained 1,855,031 prescriptions from March 2022. The results were observed through pivotal tables and diagrams created in Microsoft Excel. In the State Enterprise Centre of Registers database, there were three files that contained of electronically prescribed medication collected from a 10-day period in March. Information for the theoretical part of this study will be gathered from various available articles and research papers. In this study, each prescription is treated as one patient. Each prescription contained information on patient's sex, age group, the specialist of the physician who prescribed the medication, the ATC code of the antihypertensive drugs and the disease code from the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD). The analyzed prescription records from the State Enterprise Central Registry were depersonalized, to exclude any personal patient or health specialist information. Findings show that antihypertensive drug usage varies throughout the year, with March being the month in which the highest number of prescriptions for these drugs is written. In 2022, beta blockers were the most commonly prescribed antihypertensive drug class. Occasionally, antihypertensives are prescribed for diseases beyond hypertension, such as Type 2 diabetes mellitus, essential tremor, and chronic kidney disease (CKD). In some cases they were precribed for migraines, hyperthyroidism, etc. According to the research findings, antihypertensive drugs were prescribed to women more often than to men. Additionally, patients aged 65 and above received more antihypertensive drug prescriptions. In March 2022, the majority of prescriptions were issued by primary care specialists, with family doctors and general practice nurses being in first place. |
