As people get older, Chronic diseases become common causes of diseases, having multimorbidity. This will lead to have polypharmacy in older patients contributing to the regimen complexity which can affects patients medication adherence, prescribing quality, adverse drug reaction, health related quality of life and death. All these necessitates a clinical intervention such as deprescribing (reducing inappropriate poly-pharmacy). But such intervention should consider older patients decision/willingness in medication discontinuation process as it may affects the ultimate their clinical outcome. Though this has been extensively explored in developed countries, no attempt was made to explore willingness of older adults with chronic disease for discontinuation of inappropriate medications.
Young Professionals Chronic Disease Network (YP-CDN) Ethiopia chapter, has worked with older patients living with chronic diseases and has identified their priorities for advocacy, and were used as an input for this research project.
Medication safety for older patients with chronic disease requires deprescription of the inappropriate prescriptions.
Find the full article at http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/8/4/e020590
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In a resource-limited setting where access to NCD medication is minimal, reducing unnecessary medications (reducing medication burden) would enhance the patients’ ability to remember how to take their medications (medication-taking behaviour), quality of life, and reduce medication-related cost. Most importantly, De-prescribing is not reducing medications but a process of discontinuing inappropriate medications. We have also assessed prescribers’ attitude and practice in the de-prescribing process in another study.