As You Age, Watch Those Drugs

The federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality reported that one in five Americans over 65 has been improperly prescribed drugs – mainly barbiturates and tranquilizers. These drugs can impair balance, cause fatigue and mental confusion. As a matter of fact, experts believe that one in four admissions to nursing homes involves drugs. An example would be hip fractures. The fall that causes the fracture is often a result of the person losing their balance because of taking sedatives and tranquilizers.

One way of understanding this statistic is that the number of pharmacy alerts to patients on potential problems with the mix of drugs they are taking jumped from 3.4 million per year in 1999 to 7.9 million in 2002.

So…elderly people need to be more careful of the drugs they are taking. The more they are taking the more they can have problems.

Keep An Eye On Drugs Prescribed For The Elderly - They May Be Wrong

A study by the National Center for Health Statistics reported that doctors are prescribing the wrong drugs for the elderly 1 out of every 12 times that they write a prescription. While that's only a little over 8% of the prescription being written, keep in mind an elderly person may be taking a dozen different drugs themselves.  Doctors don't seem to realize that just as some drugs are deemed not appropriate for children, the same applies for drugs for people 65 and older. The author of the study Margie Goulding said "for every inappropriate drug, there is a safe alternative."