The Prevalence of Polypharmacy in Pediatric Practice: a Review of Russian Studies

Abstract

Foreign publications regularly demonstrate a high level of prevalence of polypharmacy among various population groups. However, the scale of polypharmacy among the Russian children is poorly understood. This article is an attempt to generalize and systematize Russian studies about the prevalence of pediatric polypharmacy. Purpose of the review was to identify the prevalence of polypharmacy in the children's population of Russian Federation. The search for articles was conducted in April 2020 in online databases eLIBRARY.ru, cyberleninka.ru, as well as GoogleScholar (the first hundred search results). The Search queries ‘polypharmacy in children’, ‘polypharmacy in pediatrics’, ‘pill burden in children’, ‘pill burden in pediatrics’ was carried out by the title of the articles, abstracts and keywords, with subsequent exclusion of duplicates. We sought to consider original studies that evaluated the prevalence polypharmacy in children aged 0 to 18 years. A total of 635 publications were identified, after deleting duplicates – 255. Further full-text screening excluded 247 publications, so 8 articles were included in the review. The selected articles were distributed equally depending on the type of the medical documentation being analyzed (outpatient records or inpatient). Only two articles indicated the average number of drugs per case of disease. The prevalence of polypharmacy in the treatment of acute respiratory infections in children in outpatient settings was 2.01–24% (min – max). Polypharmacy inpatient settings was 18.8–78% (min – max). The prevalence of pediatric polypharmacy in Russian Federation is variable and depends on research methodology