Haloperidol has been used for the treatment of schizophrenic disorders and other disorders with psychotic symptoms in psychiatric cares. It has been reported that haloperidol can cause QT-prolongation as well as Torsades de Pointes, especially in hypokalemic condition. Here, we tested the usefulness of the large clinical electronic medical record system data from a hospital located in South Korea and further investigated any change in potassium levels before and after an exposure to haloperidol.

The dataset used in this study is derived from open access database with information such as admission, discharge, diagnosis, prescribed drugs and selected laboratory data for the period 1 June 1994 to 31 July 2013. This database contains information of total 461,170 patients with 4,920,758 prescriptions and 3,811,812 data about serum potassium levels.

Extracting a dataset from this database to compare the levels of serum potassium before and after haloperidol usage, we selected 3661 cases of data, 2476 of them (67.6%) were males and 1185 (32.4%) were females. More than 98.5% (3606) was Asians, and mean age of the patients was 68.63 ± 17.3 years old. The levels of serum potassium before and after haloperidol usage were 4.93 ± 2.53 and 3.86 ± 0.6 mEq/L, respectively, and t-tests revealed that those levels were significantly different (< 0.001).

Findings showed that an exposure to haloperidol could lead to a decrease in levels of serum potassium. We suggested that EMR data can be a valuable tool to investigate the effects of treatment on several clinical data.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.