Drug allergy in hospitalized perioperative patients: the contribution of a structured questionnaire for accurate diagnosis.

AIMS: History of drug allergy is a major cause for deviation from standard of care, as well as prescribing expensive medications. We aimed to evaluate drug allergy-related history taking by surgery interns and compare it with history taking by an allergist and an anesthetist using a simple, structured questionnaire.

METHODS

Patients with a declared drug allergy were prospectively recruited from surgical wards. The interns' drug allergy diagnosis was compared with that of the allergy specialist and anesthetist that used a structured questionnaire.

RESULTS

A total of 195 patients with 305 reports of drug allergy were included; 52% of the reactions labeled by the surgical interns as allergic were tagged as not allergic by the anesthetist assisted by the questionnaire. The allergist found that 51% of these reactions represented either side effects or were nonrelated to the culprit drug.

CONCLUSION

Inconsistency between drug allergy diagnosis of surgery interns and anesthetists and allergists are common. The use of a simple structured questionnaire by the ward physicians may be accessible and beneficial for more precise diagnosis of drug allergies.