Evaluation of Drug Prescription Pattern among General Dental Practitioners in Rasht, Iran

Introduction: Irrational drug prescription is a controversial issue around the world that inter-feres not only with the patient's life but also with the society and economy. Despite few studies, there is no enough data on the prescription ha‌bits of dental practitioners. So, we aimed at eva‌luating the same issue in Rasht, Iran. Materials and Methods: This cross-sectional re-trospective study reviewing a convenience sam-ple of 850 dental prescriptions selected randomly from social insurance prescriptions assessed for two parameters: The first for WHO drug indica‌tors such as the mean number of drugs per pre‌scription, the percentage of durgs with generic name, the percentage of prescription with anti‌biotics and injectives, and the second for the pre‌scription errors. Chi-sqaure test was used for analyzing the data. Result: The average number of drugs per pre-scription was 2.64±0.85. Drugs with generic names constituted 82.9%. 93.8% of prescriptions had at least one antibiotic, whereas 26% had in-jectives. Combination of antibiotics and NSAIDS (Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) were the most common prescribed drugs. The mistakes related to drug form, name, quantity, dose, dose interval as well as route of administration were 18.4%, 22.5%, 16.5%, 14%, 39.6%, 94.9% respec‌tively. Average number of drugs, percentage of antibiotics and injectives per prescriptions, mis‌takes in drug quantity, dose interval and route of administration were lower in prescriptions of fe‌male prescribers than in males. Conclusion: Polypharmacy, overuse of antibio-tics and prescription errors among the prescrip-tions of dental practitioners were common. Conti‌nuous training of dentists would be necessary to improve the quality of prescriptions.