Evaluation of prescribing indicators in prescriptions of private practitioners in Kolkata, India

Background: To assess the prescribing indicators in prescriptions of private practitioners in Kolkata.Methods: In the observational, retrospective, cross-sectional survey, 1830 prescriptions of private practitioners were collected over a 5 years period and assessed using core prescribing indicators as per the World Health Organization “How to investigate drug use in health facilities” tool.Results: Overall the average number of drug per prescription was 3.05±0.91. No drug was prescribed by generic name. Prescriptions with an antibiotics and injections were 30% (549/1830) and 8.12% (149/1830), respectively. Drugs prescribed from essential drug list (EDL) were 29.38% (1640/5582).Conclusion: Poly-pharmacy, lack of generic prescribing, low rate of prescriptions from EDL is the present prescribing scenario of private set-up based practitioners of Kolkata. Regulation and intervention is required to improve the irrational prescribing practices

Evaluation of prescribing indicators in prescriptions of private practitioners in Kolkata, India

Background: To assess the prescribing indicators in prescriptions of private practitioners in Kolkata.Methods: In the observational, retrospective, cross-sectional survey, 1830 prescriptions of private practitioners were collected over a 5 years period and assessed using core prescribing indicators as per the World Health Organization “How to investigate drug use in health facilities” tool.Results: Overall the average number of drug per prescription was 3.05±0.91. No drug was prescribed by generic name. Prescriptions with an antibiotics and injections were 30% (549/1830) and 8.12% (149/1830), respectively. Drugs prescribed from essential drug list (EDL) were 29.38% (1640/5582).Conclusion: Poly-pharmacy, lack of generic prescribing, low rate of prescriptions from EDL is the present prescribing scenario of private set-up based practitioners of Kolkata. Regulation and intervention is required to improve the irrational prescribing practices

A comprehensive mechanistic basis of prostate cancer advancement & its personalized implementation-bridging the gap: present state and future prospect

Despite significant achievements in prostate cancer mechanistic understanding and its targeted therapies, currently there exists several major challenges that mainly arises during the therapy of advanced prostate cancer. Present prostate cancer precision medicine strategy principally suffers from several practical concerns, particularly in point of therapeutic resistance, tumor heterogeneity, complex clinical & pathological behavior and an extensive genomic perturbation landscape. Prostate Cancer Systems-Medicine Initiative is a global trans-disciplinary movement taken from corresponding scientific domains to critically determine the nature of this major existing challenges and its corresponding most possible solutions by systematically accumulating the present existing knowledge. Basically, it explains the importance of broad spectrum cancer hallmark based integrative approaches for development of combination therapy associated strategic measures for metastatic castration resistant prostate cancer. The major findings of this initiative can be summarized by identification of 136 therapeutic resistance mediators, 103 prostate cancer driver oncogenes and 8 progression pathways along with 5 terrain factors which centrally drives the basic events in prostate cancer pathogenesis, its further metastatic propagation and ultimate therapeutic resistance. In addition, it also attempts to summarize the critical features and basic challenging aspects of current therapeutic options