Study Says Many Medications for Elderly are Prescribed Inappropriately

One in five prescriptions to old people is inappropriate, states study published in PLOS ONE.

The authors of the study, led by Dedan Opondo of the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam, conducted a systematic review of English-language studies of medication use in the elderly and found that the median rate of inappropriate prescriptions was 20.5%. Some of the medications with the highest rates of inappropriate use were the antihistamine diphenhydramine, the antidepressant amitriptyline, and the pain reliever propoxyphene.