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To evaluate the drug prescription pattern in outpatient children.

A systematic literature search was performed in MEDLINE and EMBASE to identify studies published between 1994 and 2008 evaluating drug prescriptions to outpatient children.

A total of 128 drug utilisation studies were identified, 107 of which were focused on a specific drug class, in particular psychotropic drugs (49 studies) and antibiotics (32 studies). The 21 studies that evaluated all drug prescriptions involved 21 countries, mainly from Europe (13 studies). Large differences were found between studies concerning data source, sample size and age range. A prevalence ranging from 51% in Denmark to 70% in Greenland and a prescription rate (number of drugs per children) ranging from 0.8 in Norway to 3.2 in the United States …