Martin Wehling
Editor
2013
Drug therapy is the most important therapeutic intervention by any physician. Even surgeons prescribe numerically more drugs than making decisions on individual operations. The number of diagnoses increases with the age of patients, and so does the number of drugs: Men aged 80+ have 3.24, women of the same age have 3.57 diagnoses in average. As a guideline dealing with one of those diagnoses recommends three drugs on average, it is not difficult to understand why elderly patients often receive ten and more drugs. A U.S. study showed that patients aged 65+ consume five and more drugs in over 50 % of cases, and 10 % of elderly patients even used ten and more. This phenomenon of so-called polypharmacy has grave consequences: For the United States alone, it is estimated that each year about 100,000 patients die of serious adverse drug reactions. The potential of drug-drug interactions increases exponentially with the number of drugs; however, this is not the biggest problem of polypharmacy. Not mentioning costs, which in the light of the demographic revolution is a yet-increasing threat to all health care insurance systems, it reflects the generally insufficient quality of treatment in the elderly. This results—among other reasons—from the fact that most drug therapies have never been tested in the elderly; guidelines often simply extrapolate findings from younger to elder patients if the latter patient group is mentioned at all…
Drug Therapy for the Elderly
