[Epidemiological study of self-medication and its associated factors in visitors to Birjand pharmacies, 2015]

Background and Aim: Nowadays, scientific and industrial advances in medical field and pharmaceutics have provided access to various types of medications which, without proper monitoring, can lead to willful drug use. The present study aimed at determining self-medication epidemiology and its related factors in pharmacy visitors in Birjand in 2015

Materials and Methods: This analytical descriptive study was conducted on 944 Birjand pharmacy visitors, using stratified randomized sampling in the winter and spring of 2015. The necessary data was obtained by means of a validated and reliable questionnaire. Then, it was fed into SPSS [V:19] software and was analysed using the statistical testes X[2] ,independent T, Mann Whitney, Kruskal-Wallis ,and Tukey at the significant level P<0.05

Results: Mean age of the participants was 32.8 +/- 10.8 years. Among them, 84.5% from whom 58% were men, expressed their inappropriate self-medication. Common cold, allergy [61.4%] and analgesics [43.9%] had the highest rate of use. Unavailability of physicians [33%], easy access to medications in pharmacies [44.5%] and similar prescriptions [30.6%] were the main reasons for inappropriate self- medication

Conclusion: It was found that the inappropriate use of drugs, mainly in common cold, analgesic and antibiotic drugs, was high in the study population. The easy access to medicines pharmacies is probably the most important factor of the self medication

Establishment of health clinics as mass screening and referral systems for chronic non-communicable diseases in primary health care

This study aimed to establish a comprehensive screening and referral system for chronic non-communicable diseases [CNCD] in the routine primary health care, and to determine the prevalence of diabetes, pre-diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and dyslipidemia in adult population invited by public announcement to the Health clinics in Isfahan, Iran. This survey was conducted from March 2010, and the current paper presents data obtained until November 2011. To provide health services for prevention and control of CNCDs, with priority of type2 diabetes mellitus, Health clinics were established in different parts of Isfahan city with a population of approximately 2,100,000 in Iran. The general populations aged 30 years and above were invited to the Health clinics by public announcement. A total of 198972 participants were screened. The mean age of participants was 47.8 years [48.5 men, 47.3 women], with a range of 1 to 95 years old and standard deviation of 12.3 years [12.7 men, 12.1 women]. Overall, 22% of participants had impaired fasting glucose, 25% had hypercholesterolemia, 31% had hypertriglyceridemia, and 20% had metabolic syndrome. The high prevalence of dysglycemia and diabetes in our survey may serve as confirmatory evidence about the importance of mass screening and early diagnosis of CNCDs' risk factors. Our model of establishing Health clinics, as a comprehensive referral system in the routine primary health care can be adopted by Middle Eastern countries, where CNCDs notably diabetes are an emerging health problem