DALLAS: Older people who take multiple medications face an increased risk of frailty and death, according to new Australian research.
Half of Australians over 65 years of age take at least five different types of medicine. Among over 75-year-olds, the numbers are even higher.
It is a paradox that as you get older, it becomes more likely you will need multiple medications to keep you alive and healthy, but the more you take, the more likely your drugs will conflict with one another or cancel each other out.
Associate Professor Simon Bell, from Monash University’s Centre for Medicine Use and Safety, is the co-author of the research.
“We investigated what’s called polypharmacy, or taking multiple medicines,” he said.
“And we also investigated the effect of taking certain types of medicines, and those medicines were the sedative medicines and the anticholinergic medicines.
“What we found was that [for] people who took a higher number of medicines, for each additional medicine there was a 22 per cent increase [in the] risk of transitioning from a state of robust health to dying over the study period.
“And we also found those men who use sedative and anticholinergic medicines to a great degree or to a high extent were also more likely to become pre-frail or to develop frailty over the study period.”
The study followed about about 1,700 community-dwelling men aged 70 years and older over a nine-year period…..