When Doctors Make It Worse (and this happens all the time)
Posted On December 21, 2010
More is not better. In fact, more makes it worse in the case of drug interactions.
(please share this with some Chronic Pill Taker you know)
Think about it. How does one drug interact with a second drug inside your body? Hmm?
You don’t know, and neither do the docs who proscribe pill upon pill upon pill, according to a new study by a team at Thomson Reuters, and the University of Southern California.
More than half of older Americans taking an antidepressant for the first time were already taking another drug that could interact with it and cause side effects.
You don’t know, and neither do the docs who proscribe pill upon pill upon pill, according to a new study by a team at Thomson Reuters, and the University of Southern California.
More than half of older Americans taking an antidepressant for the first time were already taking another drug that could interact with it and cause side effects.
“We found a concerning degree of potentially harmful drug combinations being prescribed to seniors,” Dr. Tami Lee Mark of Thomson Reuters, parent company of Reuters, said in a statement.
This has happened before
Other studies have found that older adults are often taking dangerous combinations of prescription drugs, but doctors are not getting the message, the researchers report in the American Journal for Geriatric Psychiatry.
Other studies have found that older adults are often taking dangerous combinations of prescription drugs, but doctors are not getting the message, the researchers report in the American Journal for Geriatric Psychiatry.
They found more than 39,000 patients who started antidepressants between 2001 and 2006. “Twelve commonly reported antidepressant side effects were identified in the month after drug initiation,” Mark’s team writes.
More than 25 percent of the patients were prescribed antidepressants and another drug that could cause a major interaction. Another 36 percent had potential moderate interactions.
“The most common side effects were insomnia, somnolence and drowsiness, which occurred in 1,028 (2.6 percent) patients. The next most common side effect was dizziness, which was documented in 416 (1.1 percent) patients,” the researchers report.
SOURCE: link.reuters.com/qyf72r The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry
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