Prevalence of self-medication and related factors in Iranian women: A systematic review study

Self-medication is a significant concern worldwide. Investigating the arbitrary use of drugs in women's population seems more necessary because it occurs in sensitive periods such as pregnancy and breastfeeding. The present systematic review study was performed aimed to investigate the prevalence of self-medication and its related factors in Iranian women.

In this study, to find the related articles, the international databases of PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, Science Direct, Google Scholar, Cochran Library, and national databases such as SID and Magiran were searched using the keywords of self-medication, epidemiology, drug women, and prevalence with Boolean operators of AND and OR without time limit and in English and Farsi languages. Finally, two researchers independently examined the articles to evaluate their quality (using the NOS checklist) and extract their primary data.

A total of 13 articles with a total sample size of 5802 people were evaluated. The year of publication of the articles was 2008 to 2020, and all of them were cross-sectional studies. The results showed that the prevalence of self-medication in Iranian women is relatively high and about 49.15% and the most important reasons for self-treatment in Iranian women are the smallness of the problem and disease, belief in the harmlessness of self-treatment, not considering the condition as necessary, previous experience of the disease, and the high cost of a doctor's visit.

Self-medication among women has a relatively high prevalence, and there is a need for effective interventions to reduce and prevent self-medication. It should be considered to provide the required information and increase women's awareness about the complications of self-treatment.