Medications Contribute to Seniors’ Falls

If this wasn’t such a serious topic, I’d say “what’s new?” but it is serious. Seniors who take sleeping pills and/or antidepressants are at a higher risk of falling and sustaining a serious injury than those who don’t take those drugs.

Other medications that can increase the fall risk include blood pressure pills (they can make blood pressure go too low sometimes), so-called water pills (these diuretics can make so the senior rushes to the bathroom before having an accident and then falls or they have to get up in the middle of the night, which is a dangerous time for falls), and narcotics/opioids for pain.

These falls are huge worry because complications from falls, specifically hip fractures, are the fifth leading cause of death among seniors, say researchers.

The concern of medications and falls will continue to grow as doctors write more prescriptions for the aging population. As well, as the seniors begin to develop multiple medical problems, different medications prescribed by different specialists may end up working against each other.

Because of the concern of the connection between medications and falls, researchers from the University of British Columbia undertook a study that examined the most frequently prescribed medications for seniors and their association with the frequency of falls.

The research focused on people aged 60 years or older from data on more than 79,000 people and their use of either prescription and over-the-counter medications, or both.

Several types of medications were examined:

1. Narcotics/opioids (for treating pain)
2. Antihypertensives (for high blood pressure)
3. Diuretics (for encouraging urination)
4. Sedatives (for sleep)
5. Antidepressants
6. Antipsychotics
7. Beta-blockers (to treat heart conditions
8. Non-prescription non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) such as aspirin and ibuprofen

The only medication class that didn’t seem to have a correlation between it and falls was, surprisingly, the narcotics. The researchers did find that antidepressants seemed to be the worst culprit (Sedatives, mood-altering drugs related to falls among elderly: UBC study):

Antidepressants showed the strongest statistical association with falling, possibly because older drugs in this class have significant sedative properties. Anti-psychotics/neuroleptics often used to treat schizophrenia and other psychoses and benzodiazepines such as valium were also significantly associated with falls.

This means that doctors, nurses, and pharmacists all need to be aware of the medications their patients are taking and their effects. If need be, the treatment plan or plans should be re-evaluated in order to reduce the risk of falls due to medication effects.

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