A trio that could spell trouble: Many with dementia take risky combinations of medicines

(Press-News.org) People over 65 shouldn't take three or more medicines that act on their brain and nervous system, experts strongly warn, because the drugs can interact and raise the risk of everything from falls to overdoses to memory issues.

But a new study finds that 1 in 7 people with dementia who live outside nursing homes are taking at least three of these drugs.

Even if they received the drugs to calm some of dementia's more troubling behavioral issues, the researchers say, taking them in combination could accelerate their loss of memory and thinking ability, and raise their chance of injury and death.

The new study is published in JAMA by a team led by a University of Michigan geriatric psychiatrist who has studied the issue of medication for dementia-related behaviors for years.

It's based on data from 1.2 million people with dementia covered by Medicare and focuses on medications such as antidepressants, sedatives used as sleep medications, opioid painkillers, antipsychotics, and anti-seizure medications.

More than 831,000 of the entire study population received at least one of the medications at least once during the study period in 2018. More than 535,000 of them -- nearly half of all the people with dementia in the study -- took one or two of them for more than a month.

But the researchers focused on the 13.9% of the study population who took three or more drugs that act on the central nervous system, and took them for more than a month. They dubbed this "CNS-active polypharmacy."

That level of use goes beyond the limits recommended by the internationally accepted guidelines called the END