The perspective of clinical pharmacologist: what is the safety of complex polypharmacy in hospitalized COVID-19 patients?

Introduction: For today, in order to improve the prognosis of COVID-19 treatment outcome, the most urgent task is the rational and safe use of medicines in case of required polypharmacy. Aim: To assess the safety of provided complex pharmacotherapy in hospitalized COVID-19 patients. Methods: Single-center retrospective study of medical records of 590 COVID-19 patients hospitalized during 08.2021-10.2021. The information concerning drug prescriptions from patients’ medication’s charts was collected and processed using descriptive statistics. Results: The frequency of different medication groups9 prescriptions with certain drugs is presented in Figure 1. The median number of concurrent prescribed drugs stood at 6(3;9). Notably, coadministration of glucocorticoids and anticoagulants along with antibiotics and antifungals increases the risks of hepatonephrotoxicity and GI bleeding. Conclusions: Analysis showed that complex pharmacotherapy of COVID-19 patients was provided according to the protocols. Nevertheless, from the point of view of clinical pharmacology, the combination of the above-mentioned drugs groups may increase the risk of side effects. Therefore, even standard treatment requires monitoring of the patient9s clinical condition and laboratory parameters to increase the medication safety of personalized complex polypharmacy.