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 With a very complicated routine, “it’s easier to
forget medications,” said the lead author, Dr. Lee Lindquist, a
geriatrician at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
in Chicago.
“If you consolidate the regimen, you can know that you’re done at
the end of the day,” Lindquist told Reuters Health. For example, if
a patient is prescribed three medicines that are each supposed to be
taken twice per day, it’s likely they can be taken together each
time.
For the study, published in the journal Patient Education and
Counseling, nurses visited the homes of 200 patients over the age of
70.
All the participants had been discharged from the hospital one month
prior and they averaged nearly 80 years old.
The nurses asked participants how and when they took their
medications in a given day. Then a pharmacist and a doctor looked at
each patient’s medication list to see the lowest number of times per
day the participant could take his or her medications.
Next, they compared this number to the actual number of times per
day that each patient had said they took their medicines.
Lindquist and her team found that 85 of the participants – just over
42 percent - were following a medicine regimen that could be
simplified. Of these, 53 participants, or more than one quarter,
could cut the number of times they took their medicines by once per
day; and 32 participants, or 16 percent, could reduce that number by
at least two times each day.
The team also identified the most common reasons for an overly
complicated medication routine. One was patients’ concerns about
interactions between food and medicines, and between different
medicines. Another was misunderstanding medication instructions
given to the participants by healthcare providers like pharmacists
or physicians.
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Patients should check with their doctor before changing the way
they take their medicines, but the results of the study show the
importance of a discussion between patients and providers about the
logistics of taking necessary medicines, Lindquist said.
“That dialogue has to start; patients need to ask their pharmacist
or physician whether they can cut down medications or consolidate
them,” she said. The big questions patients should ask their
doctors, she added, is “can I make it easier on me?”
One way that people taking many medications can work with a doctor
on the simplest regimen is to walk through how they take medicines
each day.
Dr. Serena Chao, a geriatrician at Boston Medical Center who was not
involved in the study, said patients should bring all medicines to
each appointment, and arrive "prepared to talk about what time they
take their medications.”
“Go through all of the details, and then with the doctor, figure out
whether the routine can be consolidated,” Chao told Reuters Health.
Because after all, keeping track of lots of medicines can be
difficult - but the goal is to minimize the inconvenience they pose
to living everyday life.
“Your medications should not dictate your life. They should be
working for you, not the other way around,” said Lindquist.
SOURCE: bit.ly/R5c6rd Patient Education and Counseling, online April
4, 2014.
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