DRUG MISUSE AMONG URBAN MENOPAUSE POPULATION IN MUANG DISTRICT UBON RATCHATHANI PROVINCE THAILAND

Abstract

The menopause population is the deterioration of physical, mental and sexual hormones changes due to health problems. In addition, body function can affect health status by increasing susceptibility of getting diseases/illnesses. Thus symptoms of illness and hormones changes will be have risk in the unnecessarily prescription use. Most of the previous studies focused on the disease and there was a few studies regarding to drug misuse. A Cross-sectional survey method was conducted on drug misuse among menopause population in Muang district, UbonRatchathani, Thailand. The data was collected by questionnaires interview in the multiple areas by simple random sampling, screening by the inclusion criteria before sampling and remaining subjects were 411 women in total. The study revealed the menopause woman had chance to obtained more than one type of drug/medicine and noticeable that the high number was in the end of menopause group, in 411 menopause women had who used drug/medicine at least 1 type was 234 menopause, 5.0% of them were drug misuse and 51.8% were prescription use. There were 342 drugs/medicines used totally, 21 drugs/medicines used (6.1%) were drug misuse, 3 types of drugs that had misuse were antihypertensive drug, hypoglycemic agent drug and sleeping pill. The socio-demographic (age, education, occupational, monthly income, family income, health security scheme), health status (BMI), health behaviors (physical activity, eating behavior (sweet, vegetable/fruit and coffee drinking) smoking and sleeping pattern), health seeking (personal disease) and the knowledge about drug prescription were significant association with drug misuse (p< 0.05). In conclusion, the study was found that the socio-demographics, health status, health behaviors, health seeking and knowledge about drug prescription were influencing factors for drug prescription use. Thus improvement of socio-demographics, health behaviors, health seeking are required to be the topic for health education plan to improve more awareness of people in terms of drug use practices in the future.