Authors of a new study are urging doctors to check a patient’s medications if they’re starting a diabetes drug, especially if the patient is already on multiple medications. The warning comes because many patients in that scenario are given potentially inappropriate prescriptions (PIPs), a new study finds.
Nearly 40% of older adults who are on multiple medications and are starting treatment for type 2 diabetes receive at least one PIP, according to a study published on Feb. 26 in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology. Polypharmacy occurs when a person takes five or more medicines.
Researchers examined data from a UK database of 28,604 people who began taking diabetes treatments that didn’t include insulin from 2016 to 2019. Of those studied, 64.7% had polypharmacy when they started taking the diabetes drug.
Of those studied, 39.6% of older adults (people 65 and up) with polypharmacy were given at least one or more PIPs compared to 6.5% with no polypharmacy. And 22.7% of middle-aged adults (aged 45 to 65 years old) with polypharmacy received one or more PIPs compared to 1.5% with no polypharmacy.
The most common PIP in older adults was proton pump inhibitors (PPIs); in middle-aged people,it was opioids without laxatives. In older adults, using PPIs in the long term can raise a person’s risk of having an adverse drug reaction, the authors noted.
“The burden of polypharmacy, and thus PIPs, increases with age; this problem is not exclusive to the elderly,” the authors wrote.
“Many of the most frequent PIP criteria in this study relate to the inappropriate duration of medication use. Although short-term medication use may have varying risk-benefit considerations, the high prevalence of these PIPs suggests that the prescriptions may not align solely with appropriate practices,” the authors wrote.
