2012 American Geriatrics Society beers criteria: New year, new criteria, new perspective

Mark Beers, MD, recognized more than 2 decades ago that the prevention of adverse drug events in older adults is crucial to the public health of this vulnerable population. The Beers Criteria remain simultaneously one of the most used and most controversial sets of medication criteria in the world. Although not without limitations, the Beers Criteria have done more than any other tool in the past decade to improve the awareness of and clinical outcomes for older adults with polypharmacy and for the most vulnerable older adults at risk of adverse drug events. They have accomplished this because of their explicit nature, simple application for nonpharmacy experts, and wide dissemination. The continued development of explicit lists of medications to avoid in older adults, such as the Beers Criteria, is a critical component, albeit not the only one, in the public health imperative to decrease drug-related problems and improve the health of older adults. Nevertheless, continuing challenges include evaluating and communicating a drug’s risks and benefits in older adults to individual clinicians across all settings of care and developing an explicit list of these medications as part of a concise document that meets the needs of patients, clinicians, educators, researchers, policy-makers, and regulators. This article provides a perspective from the co-chairs of the 2012 American Geriatrics Society (AGS) Beers Criteria by addressing these issues, exploring the major differences and intended use of the criteria in this AGS-sponsored update, and proposing an agenda for future work. The authors believe the 2012 criteria are vastly improved from previous iterations because they include important updates to the established method for developing the explicit list of medications to avoid in older adults and consider the challenges of guiding individual clinicians in avoiding certain drugs in older adults or using them with caution. Most importantly, the quality of the criteria has been improved by the application of an evidence-based approach and the support of AGS. The decision to follow the Institute of Medicine standards for evidence and transparency was an important benchmark—one that was clearly a transition for criteria that have been traditionally developed using a Delphi consensus process. Because of the nature of clinical drug trials in older adults, evidence was at times difficult to find and to apply cleanly. The literature search was complex because of the large number and diversity of search terms required, the extended time period searched, and the lack of clinical trial data in older adults often resulting in reliance on observational data. With AGS support, the development of databases to support more-frequent updates of the criteria and continual grading of the evidence as it emerges will continue to enhance this process. Past criticisms of the Beers Criteria correctly pointed out that many of the drugs were off the market or not in widespread use, lessening their relevance to clinicians and their association with health outcomes. The support of AGS has made this list more dynamic and relevant to the real-world practice of medicine. Still, caveats in their recommendation or rationale complicate some of the resulting criteria. These caveats offer additional guidance to clinicians about when to avoid a drug but at times cannot be used as a performance measure if extracted from a large database or by surveyors without sufficient clinical insight to discern these nuances. The Beers Criteria are situated within a larger perspective of strategies to improve medication safety in older adults. Previous studies have found that a small number of medications are responsible for most adverse drug events in older adults. In a recent study, four medications or medication classes (warfarin, insulin, oral antiplatelet agents, and oral hypoglycemic agents) were associated with most