PROPORTION AND FACTORS PREDICTED SELF- MEDICATION IN ELDERLY POPULATION IN YOGYAKARTA

Pharmacists should give more attention in giving pharmaceutical care services to the elderly patients, because the decrease of physiological function could result more drug related problems. Currently, elderly patients are interesting to do selfmedication before visiting the physician. Thus, our study was aimed to understand the proportion of elderly patients who are interesting to do the self-medication and to explore the factors predicted self-medication behavior. This study was carried out by cross-sectional design. Data was collected by doing interview and giving questionnaire to the 544 elderly patients in the pharmacies of Yogyakarta Province which were chosen by proportional area sampling method. Data was analyzed descriptively and using the chi square test to understand factors which could be influenced self medication behavior. Most of the patients choose to do the self medication (63.6%) rather than directly went to the physician (36.4%). There were 3 predictors of self medication behavior in our study, which were occupation, income and type of disease with the RR were; 0.823 (95% CI:0.7010.965), 1.433 (95% CI: 1.173-1.751) and 1.027 ( 95% CI: 1.059-1.376), respectively. The occupation, income and chronic disease could predict of selfmedication behavior in elderly patients.


INTRODUCTION
WHO stated that the number of geriatric in Indonesia in 2020 will reach 11.34%.This is the biggest number of geriatric in the world.The Province of Yogyakarta is including one of 11 provinces who have geriatric population more than 7% in Indonesia (Anonim, 2009).
The reduction of absorption, distribution, metabolisme, and excretion process can cause the disorder and the detention of the process in elderly can cause the disorder and the detention of physiological function (Prest, 2003).
Healthy ageing must be followed by active ageing, continuing participation in social, cultural, spiritual, economic and civic affairs.
A well organized geriatric medicine service has a major role in healthy ageing (Pranarka, 2006).WHO stated that self medication is the process of selection and application of modern drug, herbal, or traditional medicine by individualism to treat the disease or the symptoms (WHO, 1998).WHO decided self medication as international health wisdom, due

MATERIALS AND METHODS
This study was conducted by cross-sectional design.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
This study was aimed to understand the proporsion of selfmedication practice in elderly patients in Yogyakarta Province area and to understand the predictive factors of self-medication.We involved 5 counties of Yogyakarta which were, Yogyakarta city, Sleman, Bantul, Kulonprogo and Gunungkidul.We involved 50 pharmacies and 544 elderly patients.
As the beginning we conducted this study by proportional area sampling method.However not all of the owners or pharmacists of the pharmacies located on the definitely area were agree to participate in this study.
We recruited 544 geriatric patients who did the self-medication during 3 months.Our study shows that more elderly patients were interesting to do self medication than the study conducted by Batty et al. (1997), which stated that only 32% elderly patients were interesting to find OTC for their diseases.(Chen et al., 2001).
Another study of communitydwelling older adults presented that prescription and nonprescription medications were commonly used together, with nearly 1 in 25 individuals potentially at risk for a major drug-drug interaction (Dima et al., 2008).
In this current study, we presents that elderly patients felt satisfy due to the information services during the self medication.
Ideally, by giving precise drug information, the patients will get more clearly informations, thus the inappropriate use of medication will be prevented.However, we did not observe the appropriate use of medication in this study regarding to the self medication practice.
to the decrease of health cost, increase of patients' adherence and increase of medication outcome(You   et al., 2011).The factors that can influence the self medication are gender, age, education, status of work, salary, knowledge, and attitude about the self-medication.The previous study conducted in Sleman showed that the most reason which can influence the rationalism of behavior of selfmedication behavior is education(Kristina et al., 2008).The previous study in Jakarta showed that the attention of the community to do self-medication in pharmacy was increase and the selection of medicine were serviced by assistant of pharmacist (95%) and pharmacist (5%)(Purwati et al., 2004).The objective of this research is to understand the proportion of elderly patients who are interesting to do the self medication and to explore the factors that could influence the self medication behavior.

Table I .
Geriatric patients Characteristics

Table II .
Self Medication Pattern

Table III .
Predictive of Self Medication in Elderly