OBJECTIVES

: Many patients have been using both prescription drugs and herbal medicinal products (HMPs) for the management of various disease. Therefore, we investigated the utilization trends of the prescription drugs and HMPs in Republic of Korea.

METHODS

: This study was conducted using the National Health Insurance Service–National Sample Cohort (NHIS-NSC), which consists of representative anonymized data extracted from national health insurance records pertaining to about 1,000,000 subjects from 2002 to 2013. The insured HMPs were 56 kinds of single herbal extracts and 67 kinds of mixed herbal extracts in Republic of Korea. Descriptive statistics were used to describe the basic features of the data in a study. Continuous variables were presented as the means and standard deviations, and categorical variables were summarized as the frequencies and proportions. All statistical analyses were performed in Stata MP version 15 (StataCorp LP, College Station, TX, USA).

RESULTS

: The concurrent use of prescription drugs and HMPs have mainly used in outpatients, the most frequent medical subjects of them were Internal medicine, orthopedics, neurology and general practice. The mean period of concurrent use was around three days.

The most frequent diseases in 2013 were functional dyspepsia (ICD-10: K30), low back pain (ICD-10: M54.5), gonarthrosis, unspecified (ICD-10: M17.9), acute nasopharyngitis [common cold] (ICD-10: J00), pimary gonarthrosis, bilateral (ICD-10: M17.0), bell palsy (ICD-10: G51.0), Constipation (ICd-10: K59.0), and so on. One example of concurrent use of prescription drugs and HMPs was celecoxib 200mg and ojeok-san (wuji-san in China, goshaku-san in Japan) for low back pain.

CONCLUSIONS

: Concurrent use of prescription drugs and HMPs may influence each other's actions such as uptake, breakdown, or excretion. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct a well-designed outcomes research based on these utilization trends.