Many medicines come with the risk of harmful side-effects, or adverse drug reactions. In older people the most common form of those adverse effects include nausea, dizziness, loss of appetite, low mood, weight loss, muscle weakness and delirium.
Over a six month period three quarters of people over the age of 70 years will have an adverse drug reaction. This can seriously impact on older people’s quality of life and ability to live well.
The more medicines they take, the more likely they are to experience harmful side-effects in the first place, as well as being more likely to experience many of them at the same time.
Older people suffer more from the consequences of adverse effects compared to younger people, for example experiencing falls, confusion, constipation, all of which can lead to hospitalisation.
Clearly if someone doesn’t need or shouldn’t be taking these medicines, then the impact of these side-effects on their lives is completely avoidable.
Particularlythe serious type of adverse drug reaction happens when medicines that shouldn’t be taken together interact and cause harm to the users especially aged persons.
The risk of older people being prescribed dangerous combinations of medicines is particularly high because they are often already taking multiple medicines and the risk increases as the number of medicines a person takes goes up.
In fact, once you are taking more than four medicines, the chance of experiencing an adverse drug reaction gets exponentially worse for every new medicine you take.
A specific issue for older people is taking too many anti-cholinergic medicines – or “anti-cholinergic burden”. This type of medicine is used to manage a range of conditions, including urinary incontinence and COPD, but taking too many has been linked to impaired cognitive function, increased risk of falls, heart problems, hospitalisation and death.
The number of anti-cholinergic medicines an older person is taking can quickly increase if their prescriptions stack up unchecked.
Poor prescribing practice and a lack of information sharing about medicines means that older people are being let down too often by both their clinicians and the healthcare system that is supposed to look after them.
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