gms | German Medical Science

Polypharmacy, the use of five or more chronic medications, is a highly prevalent problem among older people with multimorbidity. Increasingly, physicians and pharmacists make medication reviews aiming at an optimization of the prescriptions by lowering the number of prescriptions.

There are, however, a number of situations in which patients with polypharmacy should get or take additional medication/prescriptions:

1.

when the patient has adherence problems and takes too little medication, resulting from therapeutic complexity, scarce knowledge of medication or decreased use of maintenance medication for diseases with quiescent symptoms; and

2.

when physicians prescribe too little medication, resulting from an incomplete health problem list, insufficient prescription of medication to prevent interaction effects, or inadequate adaptation of therapy to the ageing patient.

Both situations require a different strategy. In the Impulsreferat both problems and possible solutions will be illustrated using real life cases.