Iranian Journal of War and Public Health

Abstract: Drug interaction is one of the most important problems in the treatment of diseases. The concurrent prescription of different drug categories may affects the activity of each drug. The war-injured veterans suffering from different chronic intractable diseases are a group of patients with high risk of drug interaction. A cross-sectional study was conducted on war-injured veterans treated in a psychiatric hospital for 4 months. All drugs used by each patient were identified during an interview by a physician. Data were analyzed in SPSS software. The investigation was conducted on 1435 patients. The number of medicaments used by each person was between 2 to 21. Drug interactions were identified in 99.3% of patients. There were no drug interactions in only 9 patients. The number of drug interaction was ranged from 1 to 55 in each patient with the total number of drug interactions of 15,426 in all patients. Based on FDA classification, severe drug interactions were identified in 1493 patients, whereas moderate and mild drug interaction were observed in 13015 and 930 patients, respectively. The most common type of drug interaction was observed in the patients who received different anti-depression drugs (47.5%). Among patients with severe drug interactions, the clinical investigations revealed that 85.37% of the patients were suffered from cardiovascular side effects, 58.14% from neuromuscular, 54.45% form central nervous system, 44.35% from autonomic, and 37.21% from gastrointestinal side effects. The results indicate the necessity and importance of devising some guidelines to prevent or at least decrease the drug interactions in war-injured veterans with psychiatric disorders.