Four drugs blamed for sending seniors to hospital: Which ones?
(CBS) What's behind the influx of elderly patients in hospital emergency rooms each year?
PICTURES: Not so fast! 10 life-saving questions to ask your doctor
Nearly 100,000 adults 65 or over are sent to the emergency room for drug-related side effect each year, and a new CDC study suggests that two-thirds of these hospitalizations stem from four commonly prescribed drugs.
"These data suggest that focusing safety initiatives on a few medicines that commonly cause serious, measurable harms can improve care for many older Americans," Dr. Dan Budnitz, director of CDC?s medication safety program, said in a written statement.
Which four medications are behind the hospital visits?
Warfarin, antiplatelet drugs like aspirin or clapidogrel, insulin, and oral diabetes medications.
"We weren't so surprised at the particular drugs that were involved," Budnitz told the New York Times. "But we were surprised how many of the emergency hospitalizations were due to such a relatively small number of these drugs."
For the study, published in the Nov. 23 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, CDC researchers looked at hospitalization data for older adults from 2007 and 2008.
The researchers found that 33 percent of hospitalizations - more than 33,000 patients - involved the clot-preventing drug warfarin, also known as Coumadin. Fourteen percent involved insulin injections, used to control blood sugar in diabetics, followed by 13 percent that involved anti-clotting drugs. Eleven percent of hospitalizations involved hypoglycemic pills that diabetics take.
"This is a pattern I see in my everyday practice in the emergency department," Dr. Robert Glatter, an attending physician in the department of emergency medicine at New York City's Lenox Hill Hospital, told CBS News in an email. "Education for patients, families, and caregivers who dispense medications to elderly patients is an essential component to good patient care."
Glatter said elderly patients taking blood thinners or their caregivers need to report to a doctor immediately if they see an increase in bruising or bleeding. That could mean the dose needs to be adjusted.
Dr. Michael Cohen, president of the nonprofit organization Institute for Safe Medication Practices, agreed that patient education was essential. He told WebMD that some patients "walk out of the pharmacy without knowing how to take the drug, what to do if they miss a dose."
He said patients can minimize their side effect risk by reviewing the prescription label with their pharmacist, reporting back to their doctor for scheduled blood tests, understanding potential side effects and which ones require medical follow-up, and by taking other medications only after discussing it with a doctor.
The CDC has more on medication safety.
