The use of sedative-hypnotic drugs in a university hospital in Saudi Arabia.

Sedative-hypnotic drugs (SHD) involve mainly benzodiazepines and barbiturates. For nonhospitalized patients, they are mostly prescribed by general practitioners to patients who are physically ill. In hospitals, most of the patients receiving these drugs are psychiatric patients. This study aims at describing patterns of prescribing these drugs in Saudi Arabia that may be different from that in other countries due to greater legal restriction on psychotropic medications in general. It is a retrospective analysis of charts of the first 100 patients admitted to King Khalid University Hospital (KKUH) from 1 January 1989 to the medical, surgical, psychiatric, and obstetric and gynecology wards. The results are compared to a methodologically similar study from Canada. Generally, SHDs were more frequently prescribed in Canada than in Saudi Arabia. Most of the SHDs were prescribed in the surgical ward and most of the indications in both studies were medical. These and other findings are discussed in the context of cultural aspects in Saudi Arabia.