Abstract

Background: In this era of polypharmacy in chronic disease such as hypertension and diabetes, there are more chances of food-drug interactions. Significant food-drug interaction can cause failure of drug therapy or serious adverse effect to patient.
Objective: To assess the potential food-drug interaction (pFDI) patients attending Medicine outpatient department (OPD) at a tertiary-care teaching hospital in Valsad, Gujarat, India.
Materials and Methods: The prescriptions of patients attending Medicine OPD were analyzed for demography of patients and pFDI. Freely available Drug Interaction Checker on Internet was used to analyze pFDI. Interactions were classified major, moderate, and minor according to severity and by their mechanism as pharmacokinetic or pharmaco - dynamic types. Statistical analysis was done using appropriate Microsoft Excel. Result: A total of 300 prescriptions were collected from study site; from those, 253 prescriptions were included in our study. From these, 128 (50.59%) were from male patients and 125 (49.41%) from female patients. The number of drugs prescribed to the individual patient was 4.4 ± 1.48 (range, 2–12). The frequency of pFDI per patient was 0.97 ± 1.03 (range, 0–5). The number of pFDI increased with increase in the age of patients and the number of drugs prescribed. Among 253 patients, 149 (59%) patients showed at least one pFDI, and 104 (41%) patients did not show pFDI. Among 243 pFDIs, 26 (10.69%) were pharmacodynamic and 217 (89.30%) pharmacokinetic types. In this study, four (1.65%) interactions were major, while those with moderate and minor severities accounted for 173 (71.19%) and 66 (27.16%), respectively. Conclusion: In this study, it was found that most of pFDIs were pharmacokinetic in nature and of moderate severity. Physician should be aware of significant food-drug interaction with food consumed by local community.