Objective: In the literature, children and families have been reported to show high rates of non-adherence to psychopharmacological treatment. In this study, it was aimed to investigate psychotropic drug selection, re-prescription rates and drug compliance in children who applied to a psychiatry department of a university hospital.
Method:Patients who were examined between 01.01.2013 - 01.12.2015 in OMU Child Psychiatry Outpatient Clinic were included in the study. Patients were retrospectively screened with the Nucleus® system. The data were analyzed with SSPS v15.0.
Results:12.607 patients included the study. 8.889 patients (70.4%) were prescribed at least once during the follow-up. The mean age of the patients was 12.1 ± 5 and the male sex ratio was 57.4%. The highest-prescribed drug groups were antipsychotics (32.7%) and stimulants (32.5%). Total of 38.432 psychotropic drugs were prescribed. Patients using psychotropic drugs were prescribed 4.32 times on average during this time period and 2.356 patients (26.2%) were prescribed once.
Conclusions:In the time period of the study, one out of every four patients who used psychotropic medication was only prescribed once. Many of the psychotropic drugs used in children and adolescents are part of long-term treatments, and we observed high rate of non-adherence to psychopharmacological treatment in children and families. For future research we recommend to include factors effect treatment adherence in children and families.
Key words: child,adolescent,psychotropic medication,outpatient treatment
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