Beware of polypharmacy in patients taking warfarin
SAN DIEGO – The incidence of polypharmacy among patients on warfarin therapy appears to peak at age 75, with close to 10 concurrent active prescriptions on average, results from a single-center study showed.
“Beware of polypharmacy with these patients,” Alan Jacobson, MD, said in an interview at the biennial summit of the Thrombosis & Hemostasis Societies of North America. “Anticoagulation tends to be a high-risk area. If you don’t treat, people have strokes. If you treat, they can have bleeds. Warfarin is the number one drug that gets older patients into the ER and admitted. We know that warfarin has a lot of drug-drug interactions.”
Doug Brunk/ Frontline Medical News
Dr. Alan Jacobson
The average 75-year-old in the general population takes an average of 4.2 prescription medications, yet little is known about the number of drugs that patients who receive warfarin take, and how this varies with age, according to Dr. Jacobson, a cardiologist who directs the anticoagulant service at the Veterans Affairs Loma Linda (Calif.) Healthcare System.
For example, in the ARISTOTLE trial, patients used a median of six drugs, and 26% of patients used nine or more drugs (BMJ. 2016 Jun 15;353:i2868.
In an effort to determine the average and maximum number of concurrent prescription drugs for age-dependent brackets of patients on warfarin, Dr. Jacobson and his associates reviewed the electronic pharmacy records of 1,122 warfarin patients at the VA Loma Linda Healthcare System. They excluded medications that could be obtained over the counter and calculated the average number of concurrent drugs for each of 10 age brackets: under age 50, over age 90, and eight brackets between those limits.
