Seniors Mixing Prescription and O.T.C. Drugs

By RONI CARYN RABIN
09 jan 2009--Almost 70 percent of older adults who take prescription medications also use non-prescription drugs, dietary supplements or both, researchers have reported, and one in 25 older adults is at risk of suffering a bad reaction to a poor combination of drugs.

Older people also are using more medications than in the past, the scientists also found. Almost one third take more than five prescription drugs, and more than half rely on a combination of five or more prescription drugs, over-the-counter drugs and dietary supplements.

The study, published recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association, analyzed a nationally representative sample of more than 3,000 adults, ages 57 to 85, who were surveyed between June 2005 and March 2006.

The analysis found that more than 90 percent of older adults were regularly taking at least one medication, usually a prescription drug, and nearly half regularly used an over-the-counter drug or dietary supplement. Prescription drug use increased with age and was highest among those ages 75 to 85.

Among the findings:

* Some 68 percent of those who were taking a prescription medicine also were using an additional over-the-counter drug, dietary supplement or both.

* Nearly half of the potential drug-drug interactions identified by the researchers involved the use of anticoagulants like warfarin along with antiplatelet drugs like aspirin.

* More than half of the potential adverse interactions involved use of two over-the-counter substances, like ginkgo biloba and aspirin.

* Women were more likely to use prescription medications and dietary supplements, but men were more likely to suffer from an adverse drug interaction.

* Even though men and women reported similar rates of cardiovascular disease, far fewer women were taking cholesterol-lowering statins.

* Older Hispanics were less likely than other groups to be taking medications.

“People may perceive drugs that they can obtain without a prescription as safer than prescription drugs, but what makes them less safe is that no one knows you’re taking them,” said Dr. Stacy Tessler Lindau, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology and medicine-geriatrics at the University of Chicago Medical Center and a senior author of the paper.

Elderly people who purchase over-the-counter drugs, she added, “should get in the habit of buying them at the pharmacy counter and ask the pharmacist, ‘How will this interact with the other drugs I’m taking?’”