OBJECTIVES: Update the literature regarding the abbreviations commonly used in medical prescription and the consequences of this act. METHODS: A literature review was conducted in PubMed and Lilacs. Twenty-nine studies from the last 10 years were analyzed, the database search used the following descriptors: "Abbreviations as Topic" [Mesh] AND ("Medication Errors" [Mesh] OR "Inappropriate Prescribing" [Mesh]). There was access to 124 articles, of which 23 were excluded because they did not have access to the full text, 63 because they were not related to the topic and 9 because they were repeated in the database. Content analysis was carried out including the following aspects: abbreviations commonly used in health and consequences of the use of abbreviations in health. RESULTS: The most commonly used abbreviations in health were “SC” to refer to subcutaneous, “U” to refer to units, and “UI” to refer to insulin units, all of them considered as high-risk abbreviations. In relation to the frequency of the use of abbreviations in medical prescription, there were several studies that addressed the subject, and in all of them, figures greater than 77% of use of abbreviations were observed, which increased with the passing of the years until reaching to 100% in 2014. The consequences of the use of health abbreviations were related to medication errors, mainly to administration-related errors. CONCLUSIONS: The use of abbreviations in health is related to medication errors, 100% of medical prescriptions contain abbreviations. The most common are "SC", "U" and "UI", which can be confused with "0" or "4", with the risk of multiplying the dose by 10 or more (for example, 4U could have been confused with 40).