Over medication adds risk for elderly
An Australian study has surprisingly found that elderly people may receive no benefit from long-term use of many common medicines and their health may actually improve if they stopped taking them.
By ceasing to take medicines such as sleeping pills and anti-depressants people’s mental abilities could be improved and thus reduce the likelihood of serious falls, according to the analysis by Professor David Le Couteur, director of the Centre for Education and Research on Ageing at the University of Sydney and a geriatrician at Concord Hospital, NSW.
Professor Le Couteur’s study combined previous research into drug withdrawal in older people and also found that in up to 85% of people aged 65 or older that blood pressure was stable for six months to five years after withdrawal of blood pressure medicines without any increase in the death rate.
In one New Zealand study people taking sedatives or anti-depressants were assigned either to continue to take the medicines or were switched to placebo. Those who took the placebo were 66% less likely to suffer a fall over the following year.
Professor Le Couteur said his research was intended to highlight the gap between the results of company-sponsored trials and how elderly people actually fared on the same drugs. “There’s lots of money to show medicines work and very little money to show they don’t,” he said.
