Americans increasingly come into contact with powerful medicines that possess great potential both to help and to harm. For older patients with multiple diseases, properly managed pharmacotherapy can help them live longer and live better. However, medications also have the potential to cause serious harm on a wide scale.
Recent studies point to the severity of the problem.
Although these studies examined medication use in Americans of all ages, given the special vulnerabilities of older people to medication-related problems, it is reasonable to expect that older people carry a disproportionate burden of adverse outcomes due to medication therapy. Even when medications are taken as intended, some adverse reactions occur that are severe enough to cause disability and even death. Although a study reported in the April 1998 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, did not focus specifically on older people, it estimated that 106,000 fatal adverse drug reactions occur annually. If these adverse drug reactions were classified as a distinct disease, it would rank as the fifth leading cause of death in the U.S. Click here for more details.