Knowledge and perceptions about food and drug interactions: A survey among second year medical undergraduate students in a government medical college in southern India

Background: Food drug interactions occur due to interaction between the drug and food products leading to decreased efficacy of the medication by bringing about change in pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics of the drugs. Objectives: To evaluate the knowledge attitude regarding the food and drug interactions among the second year medical under graduate students. Materials and Methods: This was a questionnaire -based, cross-sectional study in which a self developed, pre-tested, semi-structured questionnaire was used. Respondents were 152 second year medical students. Questions were framed to obtain information about various issues concerned with knowledge about food and drug interactions. Results: It was seen that majority of 82% of the students were aware about food and alcoholic beverage interfering with drug in the body. 64% of the students had the knowledge about impact of food drug interaction depends on a various factors like drug dosage, person’s age, & health status. Conclusion: Sound knowledge about food and drug interactions is a vital part to accomplish the therapeutic efficacy in the medications in the patients. In this regard, students are future doctors and their knowledge to regarding food and drug interaction needs to be upgraded. © This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.