Managing Polypharmacy and Deprescribing in Elderly

Cigdem Apaydin Kaya

A chapter in Primary Health Care from IntechOpen

Abstract: The increase in the number of medications used may result many negative consequences for patients and health system. Elderly patients are more likely to encounter these health problems associated with polypharmacy. Deprescribing, the process of tapering, withdrawing, discontinuing, or stopping medications, is important in reducing polypharmacy, adverse drug effects, inappropriate or ineffective medication use, and costs. Deprescribing in elderly patients in accordance with the evidence based guidelines has many positive outcomes in older people such as decrease in the risk of falls, improvement in cognition, and improvement in patients' global health status. Therefore, each visit of an elderly patient should be considered as an opportunity to evaluate the unnecessary use or harms of the prescribed or nonprescribed medications. Clinicians should decide to deprescription process by individualized care goals in line with current guidelines. Beers Criteria, STOPP/START and The Medication Appropriateness Index-MAI can be used to assit clinicians to identify unnecessary or potentially inappropriate drugs and reduce the number of medications in older patients. But, a balance is required between over and under prescribing. In conclusion, prevention of polypharmacy and withdrawing unneccesary and inappropriate medications may be the best clinical decision for family physicians who follow the elderly in primary care.

Keywords: polypharmacy; deprescription; elderly; older adults; aging; drug use; advers drug events; primary care (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/78212 (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:ito:pchaps:243903

DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.99637

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from IntechOpen
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Slobodan Momcilovic ().