The Prevalence of Anticholinergic Drugs and Correlation with Pneumonia in Elderly Patients: A Population-Based Study in Taiwan

Chien-Ying Lee, Yih-Dih Cheng, Wei-Yuan Cheng, Tung-Han Tsai and Kuang-Hua Huang
Additional contact information
Chien-Ying Lee: Department of Pharmacology, Chung Shan Medical University, Taichung 40201, Taiwan
Yih-Dih Cheng: School of pharmacy, China Medical University, Taichung 40402, Taiwan
Wei-Yuan Cheng: Taso-Tun Psychiatric Center, Ministry of Health and Welfare, Nantou 54249, Taiwan
Tung-Han Tsai: Department of Health Services Administration, China Medical University, Taichung 40402, Taiwan
Kuang-Hua Huang: Department of Health Services Administration, China Medical University, Taichung 40402, Taiwan

IJERPH, 2020, vol. 17, issue 17, 1-14

Abstract: Anticholinergic drugs may increase the risk of serious respiratory infection, especially in the elderly. The study aims to investigate the prevalence of anticholinergic drugs and the correlation of incident pneumonia associated with the use of anticholinergic drugs among the elderly in Taiwan. The study population was 275,005 elderly patients aged ≥65 years old, selected from the longitudinal health insurance database (LHID) in 2016. Among all the elderly patients, about 60% had received anticholinergic medication at least once. Furthermore, the study selected elderly patients who had not been diagnosed with pneumonia and had not received any anticholinergic drugs in the past year in order to evaluate the correlation between pneumonia and anticholinergic drugs. The study excluded elderly patients who died or had received related drugs of incident pneumonia during the study period and selected elderly patients receiving anticholinergic drugs as the case group. Propensity score matching (PSM) on a 1:1 scale was used to match elderly patients that were not receiving any anticholinergic drugs as the control group, resulting in a final sample of 32,215 patients receiving anticholinergic drugs and 32,215 patients not receiving any anticholinergic drugs. Conditional logistic regression was used to estimate the association between anticholinergic drugs and pneumonia after controlling for potential confounders. Compared with patients not receiving anticholinergic drugs, the adjusted odds ratio of patients receiving anticholinergic drugs was 1.33 (95% confidence interval: 1.18 to 1.49). Anticholinergic medication is common among elderly patients in Taiwan. Elderly patients receiving anticholinergic drugs may increase their risk of incident pneumonia. The safety of anticholinergic drugs in the elderly should be of concern in Taiwan.

Keywords: anticholinergic drugs; pneumonia; elderly; potentially inappropriate medication; pharmacoepidemiology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/17/6260/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/17/6260/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:17:y:2020:i:17:p:6260-:d:405311

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().