Medications for Older Persons

Medications for Older Persons: Recommendations, Harms, Evidence makes available in one complete resource the benefits of medications for older persons, harms if they are prescribed potentially inappropriate medications or have potential prescribing omissions, and how many adverse events, rehospitalizations, and deaths are attributable to these medications. The book opens with a summary of medications that most benefit older patients, followed by the impact of older persons’ alcohol consumption, self-medication, and medication list accuracy and how these factors correlate to health outcomes. The remainder of the book is devoted to the assessment of medication groups focusing on Numbers Needed to Treat, Numbers Needed to Harm, and characteristics and numbers of adverse events. Medication groups covered include cardiovascular, central nervous system, renal, gastrointestinal, musculoskeletal, respiratory, endocrine, pain, and fall prevention. This text benefits researchers by providing a single source to identify groups of medications which require improvement in their benefit/harm profiles. Concurrently, it provides medications for each condition to guide older persons, their families, their physicians, pharmaceutical researchers, policy makers, and ministries of health in the health and well-being of the aging population.

• Conveys the benefit and harm profiles of medications for older persons
• Outlines which randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of medication effects have the lowest risk of bias and highest GRADE quality
• Discusses which randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have the longest and most complete follow up and accounts for the key risk factors and confounders