Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

High numbers of non-elderly adults are exposed to multiple prescription medications on a regular basis. This may expose them to potentially dangerous combinations of prescription medications which may lead to a higher risk of health problems or death. We do not know what proportion of non-elderly adults are regularly exposed to these dangerous combinations of medications in Quebec. We conducted a review of the literature including studies published in all years from around the world to calculate the global proportion of people exposed to these dangerous drug combinations, but found that the results from different studies were very different from each other, and ranged from 2 to 80% of the non-elderly adult population. We used the results from our literature review to find out which study characteristics can help explain these large differences in the number of people exposed to dangerous medication combinations. We expect that our results will help us better design a study to find out the proportion of people exposed to dangerous drug combinations in Quebec.