The following originally appeared on The Upshot (copyright 2019, The New York Times Company).
We know many people end up with a risky pileup of prescribed medications. Many efforts have been made, with varied success, to correct this problem. Yet we’ve usually focused on physician behavior, when there’s another powerful lever: pharmacists.
About 30 percent of older adults in the United States and Canada filled a prescription in the last few years for one of many medications that the American Geriatrics Society recommends they avoid. Such drugs can lead to more harm — like cognitive impairment or falls — than good, and often safer options are available.
“Older adults are taking an awful lot of pills these days — 66 percent take five drugs or more per day, and 27 percent take 10 or more per day — so if some of those pills are no longer necessary and may even be causing harm, why not ask if it is time to deprescribe?” said Dr. Cara Tannenbaum, a professor of medicine and pharmacy at the University of Montreal, and director of the Canadian Deprescribing Network.
It’s not easy to get patients off such drugs, though. Physicians often don’t have enough information about what patients are taking, or may lack the time to talk to patients about these medications. They fear that stopping the drugs might cause harm or make patients upset.
To explore the possible role of pharmacists, Dr. Tannenbaum conducted a large randomized controlled trial over four years in community pharmacies in Quebec. The results of the study were recently published in JAMA.
Patients 65 years or older were randomly assigned to one of two groups. In the intervention group, pharmacists gave both patients and their physicians educational materials on the specific drug that might have been inappropriately prescribed. Such brochures could be delivered by mail or in person. The control group got the usual care, with no educational materials.
Drugs that were targets for deprescribing included sedatives, first-generation antihistamines, glyburide (used to treat diabetes), and certain nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, like ibuprofen or naproxen. The main outcome of interest was the ending of a prescription for one of the four medication classes six months later.
Almost 500 patients, average age 75, participated in the trial, and about 90 percent of them completed it. The intervention made a difference. Within six months, 43 percent of the patients in the intervention group had stopped taking one of the selected medicines. The corresponding figure was 12 percent in the control group.
In medicine, we often focus on the traditional doctor/patient interaction. We tend to ignore practitioners who come into contact with patients more than physicians, who in this case could hand over brochures personally. In the study, pharmacists were also paid to send information to the patients’ doctors ($19 Canadian, equivalent to $14 American, per physician outreach).
