Older Women Are More Willing to Reduce Number of Daily Medications

The study was carried out by researchers from CINTESIS/University of Aveiro.

A group of researchers from CINTESIS/University of Aveiro revealed that the vast majority of older people who are polymedicated – taking five or more medications a day – are willing to reduce their consumption of these drugs.

The study entitled “Predictors of older patients’ willingness to have medications deprescribed: A cross-sectional study” showed that 83.3% of patients would be willing to stop taking one or more medications, upon recommendation of their doctor.

Older and female patients are the ones who are more open and willing to reduce their daily medication, explain Anabela Pereira and Óscar Ribeiro, researchers at CINTESIS/UA and authors of this work, published in the scientific journal “Basic & Clinical Pharmacology & Toxicology“.

Despite being open to reducing their daily medication, 68.8% of the elderly are afraid of losing the positive effects of the medication and 53.6% put up resistance to giving up drugs that have been part of their daily medication for many years.

This study included 192 patients with a median age of 72 years. About 77% of the total patients took more than five medications a day, and 91.6% had three or more diseases.

“Characteristics of older patients that could predict willingness to take less medication were identified: age and female gender. These characteristics can serve, in clinical practice, to select patients more likely to accept a reduction in medication”, says Anabela Pereira, first author of the study that is incorporated into a broader project on “Deprescribing in the Elderly”.

According to the researcher, “doctors should take this opportunity to talk to their patients about the possibility of initiating deprescribing, i.e. stopping or reducing the taking of medications that are considered inappropriate”.

In addition to Anabela Pereira and Óscar Ribeiro, from CINTESIS/UA and the Associate Laboratory RISE, this study had the participation of Manuel Veríssimo, professor at the University of Coimbra.