Evidence for Assessing Drug Safety and Drug Use in Older People

With the growing number of older adults and increases in age-related chronic disease, the complexity of pharmacotherapy has increased, resulting in enormous implications for medication safety. Older adults often suffer from two or more chronic diseases (multimorbidity) and therefore use a higher number of drugs, compared to other age, being more susceptible to drug-related problems, including polypharmacy, potentially inappropriate medications, drug ineffectiveness, drug-drug interactions, and adverse drug events.

The development of strategies for the detection and prevention of drug-related problems is important as guidance and support clinical decision-making and strengthening research into drug safety is an essential condition for achieving wide-ranging improvements. Although different approaches have been identified to avoid drug-related problems in older patients, there is still insufficient information about their clinical importance or their public health impact.

This Research Topic aims to provide the state of the art in the best practice of drug safety in older people, in order to improve the monitoring and the management of pharmacotherapy in older patients. The following purposes/approaches are particularly important:
- Real-world evidence of drug safety/utilization in older patients.
- The overconsumption of medicines in general, including also countries with less sophisticated software systems.
- Real-world evidence of the impact of tools or guidelines developed to optimize medication safety in older people.
- Validation studies using real-world data in geriatrics.
- Tools or guidelines combining evidence and opinion of experts to address any drug-related problems and/or acts of omission to prescribe drugs when indicated.
- Deprescribing strategies for potentially inappropriate medications, anticholinergic medication, and other candidates for deprescribing. We would be looking for Original Research articles with qualitative or quantitative measures.

Additionally, this Research Topic welcomes manuscripts reporting the use of medication in self-purchasing patients or co-payments of their medication, especially from Low-to-Middle-Income Countries. These studies can be performed using pharmacoepidemiology studies of primary and secondary data, which includes randomized clinical trials, cohort studies and health care databases. Research including primary research/field studies and assessing the (clinical) importance and public health impact of drug-related problems is welcome.