Prevalence and Characteristics of Adverse Drug Reaction among Patients in Jubail, Saudi Arabia

Introduction: Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs) often causes prolonged hospitalization and have an increased risk of mortality. Adverse drug reaction can greatly affect the quality of life. It may lead to various undesired outcomes such as use of suboptimal alternative drugs, unnecessary investigations and delayed treatment. This study aims to evaluate the prevalence and characteristics of adverse drug reaction as well as, risk factors of allergic drug reactions among hospitalized patients at the secondary care center Royal Commission Hospital (RCH) in Jubail, Saudi Arabia.

Methods: A cross-sectional study conducted at the RCH in Jubail, Saudi Arabia. The study included all patients admitted to RCH during the period from 2017 to 2019. All patients admitted to RCH during the study period were reviewed to identify those with at least one documented drug allergy incident. The data was collected by the study authors from the hospital medical electronic data system by using a structured questionnaire that consists of two sections. The main section is the one adapted from the Adverse Drug Reaction Probability Scale (Naranjo).

Results: A total of 93 patients with reported ADR were recruited in the current study, more than half (55.91%) of them were females, with a mean age of 35.79 ± 21.18. There was a statistically significant (P-value 0.042) difference in the prevalence of ADR by gender, and the "definitely" identified ADR cases were all males. Besides, the correlation was also significant (P<0.05) between the prevalence of ADR and the use of specific antagonists as well as the committee action. The suspected medications for ADR were mainly antibiotics by 54%, particularly the third generation cephalosporins at 13%, followed by the penicillin subtype at 11%. Ceftriaxone was the highest at 13.54%, followed by vancomycin at 9.38%, and cefazolin at 8.33%. This was followed by analgesic class at 14%.

Conclusion: ADRs reported in the current study were mainly probable, and the definite ones were within the reported prevalence globally. The maximum number of ADRs reported was with antibiotics. The majority of patients had recovered from the ADRs.