Nearly 20 percent of people needing hospital care have reacted badly to taking multiple prescription drugs.
It’s a growing problem. In 2004, just 6 percent of hospital admissions were the result of polypharmacy, when five or more medications are taken at the same time.
Researchers from the University of Liverpool reviewed admissions to hospitals across the city during one month in 2019 and discovered that 16.5 percent were caused by adverse reactions to multiple drugs.
Polypharmacy has been on the rise over the past 25 years, and doctors are routinely prescribing a drug to lower cholesterol, for example, along with remedies for cardiovascular control, diabetes, pain and gastro-intestinal problems. Often, the patient doesn’t need the drug in the first place, and doctors aren’t monitoring the patient to see if he can come off the medication.
According to one study by the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), around 10 percent of drugs should never have been prescribed, which results in 110 million unnecessary prescriptions every year.
The cost of polypharmacy adverse reactions costs the NHS around £2 billion a year, and the true extent of the problem could be worse than the figures suggest, with less serious drug reactions never being reported.
(Source: BMJ Open, 2022; 12: e055551)
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