Dr. Denis O’Mahony, a geriatrician from University College Cork and Cork University Hospital, Wilton, Cork, Ireland, tells Reuters Health, “For those who must prescribe for older multimorbid patients, one can use tools like the STOPP/START criteria to screen for potentially inappropriate medications (PIMs) and potential prescribing omissions (PPOs). Also, the routine use of drug-drug and drug-disease interaction databases can be helpful for optimizing prescriptions. Keeping a sensible limit on the number of prescription medicines should be considered also, particularly in patients with a life expectancy that is likely less than one year.”
“We have just recently published new data from a single center cluster randomized controlled trial here in Cork showing that single time point deployment of STOPP/START criteria early in the emergency admissions of older people admitted under the care of services other than specialist Geriatric Medicine results in an approximate halving of the rate of incident adverse drug reactions during the index admission,” Dr. O’Mahony said. “A few years ago, we showed in another single center randomized controlled trial that a similar intervention resulted in a highly significant and sustained improvement in medication appropriateness.”
