Gender differences and psychotropic polypharmacy in psychiatric patients in Brazil: a cross-sectional analysis of the PESSOAS Project

• Autor(a) principal: Juliana de Oliveira Costa
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Outros Autores: Maria das Graças Braga Ceccato, Ana Paula Souto Melo, Francisco de Assis Acurcio, Mark Drew Crosland Guimarães
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFMG
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.1590/0102-311X00168915; http://hdl.handle.net/1843/59393
• topic: Polypharmacy; Psychotropic drugs; Mental disorders; Gender and health; Polimedicação; Psicotrópicos; Transtornos mentais; Saúde de gênero

We aimed to estimate the prevalence and correlates of psychotropic poly-pharmacy in Brazilian psychiatric patients by gender. Sociodemographic, behavioral and clinical data were obtained through face-to-face interviews and medical charts of 2,475 patients. Psychotropic polypharmacy was defined as the use of two or more psychotropic drugs and occurred in 85.7% of men (95%CI: 83.6%-87.6%) and 84.9% of women (95%CI: 82.8%-86.8%; p > 0.05). The mean number of psychotropic drugs/patient was 2.98 ± 1.23 and most common combinations included antipsychotics. Multivariate analysis showed that for both genders, previous hospitalization, severe mental illness, multi-ple psychiatric diagnoses and an insufficient number of professionals in the health care unit was associated with psychotropic polypharmacy. However, other correlates such as inpatient care, use of non-psychotropic drugs, living in unstable conditions and current smoking vary among them. Psychotropic polypharmacy was a common practice in this national sample. The results highlighted the need for national guidelines to manage patients with mental illness, considering the difference among genders and disease severity, to re-duce the burden of polyphamacy in this population.