• Fahmi Y Al-Ashwal, SulaimanSyed Azhar SyedSAS0000-0001-5535-2802Discipline of Clinical Pharmacy, School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang, Malaysia., Sheikh GhadziSiti MaisharahSM0000-0001-8855-8954Discipline of Clinical Pharmacy, School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang, Malaysia., Mohammed Abdullah Kubas, and Abdulsalam Halboup.
• Discipline of Clinical Pharmacy, School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang, Malaysia.
• Curr Med Res Opin. 2022 Mar 1; 38 (3): 451-459.

BackgroundRisk evaluation of atherosclerotic cardiovascular diseases can guide the decision-making on various preventive measures, such as initiating or deferring statin therapy. Pharmacists can play an active part in the risk evaluation and primary prevention of atherosclerotic cardiovascular diseases. Thus, our study aimed to assess the pharmacists' knowledge, attitude, perceived barriers, and practices regarding risk assessment of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.Materials And MethodsA cross-sectional study was conducted among 500 pharmacists using a structured validated questionnaire between November 2020 and February 2021. The Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis tests were used to analyze the data.ResultsA total of 456 pharmacists completed the questionnaire out of 500 distributed (91.2% response rate). Over 60% of participants responded with never or rarely for two out of five cardiovascular diseases (CVD) prevention practices. The lowest pharmacist-patient counseling practices were for side effects of statin medication (14.5%) and reviewing the patient's medications to avoid potential statin-drug interactions (31.8%). Participants had a high positive attitude (median = 34 out of 40). The three major barriers for risk assessment were the lack of support (74.8%), the lack of resources (70.6%), and inadequate training (48.7%). Interestingly, having ≤75 customers a day, community pharmacies, PharmD degree, age ≥30 years, and experience ≥6 years were significantly associated (p < .05) with higher CVD prevention activities and counseling practices.ConclusionPharmacists have a high positive attitude toward CVD risk assessment. However, they had insufficient knowledge and only provided limited activities and counseling services for CVD prevention and statin therapy. Participants perceived several barriers to CVD risk assessment services in pharmacies. Therefore, it is necessary to remove these impediments for pharmacists to be more involved in CVD risk assessment and prevention. Also, continuing medical education and adequate training for pharmacists are required.

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