Abstract

A STUDY ON POLYPHARMACY IN ELDERLY PATIENTS

Mahendra Kumar Betur Jayappa, Femi A. Rahman, Ashirvad Antony Veigas*,

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Abstract

Polypharmacy is the use of two or more drugs simultaneously. This is very common in adults as they are more prone to occurance of comorbidities. This may lead to different drug related problems like adverse drug reactions, drug interactions, overdose, prescription of inappropriate drugs, subtherapeutic dose and may also lead to rehospitalization. The study was conducted inorder to assess and evaluate the clinical outcome and effects on patients receiving polypharmacy. A total of 102 patients were enrolled in the study. The most common comorbidities were hypertension (61.8%) and diabetes mellitus (50.9%). There were many drug related problems found out in the patients in which the maximum were the ADR and drug interaction. The common adverse drug reactions were electrolyte imbalance (33.4%), dizziness (17.6%); constipation (15.7%); edema (13.7 %); and diarrhoea (10.7%). Drug-drug interaction (92.17%) and ADR (72.5%) were the most common drug related problems found during the study period with others like untreated indication (26.4%), overdose (3.9%), drug used without indication (3.9%) and drug duplication (13.7%). The mean of total DRPS in non-polypharmacy, polypharmacy and excessive polypharmacy were 4, 6.77, and 12.5 respectively. Thus we observed that polypharmacy is common in geriatric patients and one of the main risk factors is multimorbidity. The number of drugs in treatment regimen is directly proportional to the total number of drug related problems found out in each case.

Keywords: Polypharmacy, Elderly patients, Drug related problems.