ArticleEuropean journal of pediatrics2013
Paediatric drug use with focus on off-label prescriptions in Lombardy and implications for therapeutic approaches.
Article in European journal of pediatrics, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- A Quantitative Review of Un-licensed and Off-label Medicines Use in Children Aged 0-2 Years in the Private Sector in South Africa: Extent, Challenges, and Implications.Current pediatric reviews · 2026Article
- Off-label prescribing in Italian pediatric practice: insights from a nationwide survey.European journal of pediatrics · 2025Article
- Off-Label Prescribing in Pediatric Population-Literature Review for 2012-2022.Pharmaceutics · 2023Review
- Pediatric Drug Safety Surveillance: A 10-Year Analysis of Adverse Drug Reaction Reporting Data in Calabria, Southern Italy.Drug safety · 2022Review
- From Prescription Drugs to Natural Health Products: Medication Use in Canadian Infants.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- High prevalence of off-label and unlicensed paediatric prescribing in a hospital in Indonesia during the period Aug.-Oct. 2014.PloS one · 2020Article
- Safety and Tolerability of Antipsychotic Drugs in Pediatric Patients: Data From a 1-Year Naturalistic Study.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2020Article
- Trends in Off-Label Drug Use in Ambulatory Settings: 2006-2015.Pediatrics · 2019Article
- Gender Differences in Outpatient Pediatric Drug Utilization: A Cohort Study From Southern Italy.Frontiers in pharmacology · 2019Article
- Two decades of off-label prescribing in children: a literature review.World journal of pediatrics : WJP · 2018Review
- Off-Label Medication use in Children, More Common than We Think: A Systematic Review of the Literature.The Journal of the Oklahoma State Medical Association · 2018Article
- Guidelines for proton pump inhibitor prescriptions in paediatric intensive care unit.International journal of clinical pharmacy · 2017Observational
- Use of medicines and other products for therapeutic purposes among children in Brazil.Revista de saude publica · 2016Article
- Maltese prescribers use of off-label and unlicensed medicines in children: perceptions and attitudes.International journal of clinical pharmacy · 2016Article
- Patterns of antidepressant use in Italy: therapy duration, adherence and switching.Clinical drug investigation · 2015Article
- How to improve prescription of inhaled salbutamol by providing standardised feedback on administration: a controlled intervention pilot study with follow-up.BMC health services research · 2015Article
- Off-label medicine use in pediatric inpatients: a prospective observational study at a tertiary care hospital in India.International journal of pediatrics · 2014Article
- Unlicensed and Off-Label Drug Use in Children Before and After Pediatric Governmental Initiatives.The journal of pediatric pharmacology and therapeutics : JPPT : the official journal of PPAGArticle
- [Drug prescriptions study in the outpatient setting: assessment of off-label uses in children].Atencion primariaArticle
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The persistent lack of information on the paediatric use of most medicinal products is a major hindrance towards an optimal treatment of paediatric patients. Several studies have documented the high prevalence of off-label use in paediatric population. No comprehensive studies, however, exist that analyse in full all prescriptions for all dispensed drugs, especially in view of the recent intervention by the European Medicine Agency to tackle this issue. We have assessed the drug prescription pattern in the paediatric outpatient population of Lombardy, which has a reliable record of such prescriptions focusing on off-label drug use. We analysed all dispensed outpatient prescriptions to children aged 0-18 years and the proportion of off-label drug use in 2011, using data from the regional administrative prescriptions database. A total of 4,027,119 prescriptions were dispensed, of which 133,619 (3.3 %) were off-label. The anatomical therapeutic chemical classes most involved in off-label prescriptions were antibiotics for systemic use (33,629), alimentary tract and metabolism (31,739) and respiratory tract (31,458). The highest rate (8 %) of off-label drug prescriptions was observed in the age range 0-1. The study revealed also an inappropriate prescription pattern for fluoroquinolones and drugs targeting the cardiovascular and musculoskeletal systems. We identified inappropriate prescriptions for specific drug classes, highlighting the need of increasing pharmacological studies in the paediatric patients and specific critical drugs/drug classes in which such studies are particularly urgent. Depending on the region, inappropriate paediatric drug prescriptions may affect different drug classes, indicating the need of tailoring specific programmes of information.
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