Profile of prescription medication in an internal medicine ward

Abstract

Aging-related loss of resilience associated with the lack of evidence regarding the therapeutic efficacy of medicines can prompt a lack of efficacy of treatments and multiple prescriptions. This work aims to characterize the medication profile of Portuguese older adult inpatients and explore the relationship between hospitalization days and the consumption of medicines. A retrospective data analysis study in older patients who were admitted to a medical internal medicine ward during 2019. The median age of the 616 patients included was 85 years. During the hospitalized period, patients took on average 18.08 medicines. The most prescribed drugs belong to the subgroup of (a) anti-thrombotic agents (6.7%), with enoxaparin being the most prescribed, (b) other analgesics and antipyretics (6.6%), paracetamol being the most frequent, and (c) the Angiotensin Conversion Enzyme Inhibitor (ACE) (6.5%), captopril being the most frequent. The high number of prescriptions in older adults during their hospitalization suggests the need of changing therapeutics to achieve a better efficacy of treatment, which corroborates the hypothesis that the lack of scientific evidence concerning the risk/benefits of many medical therapies in older adults can make it difficult to achieve good clinical outcomes and promote the wastage of health resources.