Prescribing medicines for elderly patients

Populations around the world are ageing. This can be attributed, in part, to the availability of more effective therapeutic interventions for many diseases, better risk factor management and overall improvements in healthcare. However, this has resulted in increasingly frailer patients with multiple co-morbidities who are often taking many different medicines (polypharmacy). Prescribers must be able to take into account the pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic changes in elderly individuals and cope with the complexity of polypharmacy, which provides the potential for more drug–drug and drug–disease interactions.