Beers criteria and other stories . . .
BMJ 2015; 351 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.h6408 (Published 02 December 2015) Cite this as: BMJ 2015;351:h6408
Bad drugs for older patients
It is universally acknowledged that many older people take too many drugs, and that many are being harmed by taking the wrong drugs or the wrong combination of drugs. One metric for this is called the Beers criteria, endorsed by the American Geriatrics Society and recently applied to a sample of 13 900 patients aged 65 or over from the UK Clinical Practice Research Dataset (BMC Geriatr 2015;15:146, doi:10.1186/s12877-015-0143-8). Polypharmacy rates have risen sharply since 2003, but high risk medication prevalence has remained stable over a decade. A third of older people take high risk drugs, but only half of the total prevalence was long term. Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs top the list.
Protective poo
Dutch researchers have recently uncovered the protective role of intestinal microbiota during …
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