Clinically Relevant Psychopharmacological Interactions in the Elderly

Pp: 49-64 (16)

* (Excluding Mailing and Handling)

Abstract

The elderly population suffers more drug-drug interactions (DDI), drugdisease interactions (DDE) and adverse drug reactions (ADR) than other age groups. The main risk factor is the high number of drugs administered. The use of psychotropic medications is very high in elderly individuals, especially in residents of nursing homes. A lot of the clinically relevant DDI involve a psychotropic drug. Besides, their medical care implies multiple professionals from different specialties and psychotropic drugs may interact with other prescribed medications used to treat concomitant medical illnesses. Moreover, the amount of time dedicated to their attention is usually insufficient. All these circumstances extremely complicate the possibility to detect DDI while prescribing. This is the reason why we consider electronic programs an indispensable help for this task. Anyway, physicians should have a basic knowledge of the main mechanisms implicated in DDI and of those DDI clinically relevant.

Keywords: Aged, Anticonvulsants, Antidepressive Agents, Antiparkinson agents, Antipsychotic Agents, Computer-assisted, drug Interactions, Drug therapy, Electronic prescribing, Food-Drug Interactions, frail elderly, Health Services for the aged, Herb-Drug Interactions, Inappropriate Prescribing, Medical Informatics, Medical Order Entry Systems, Mobile Applications, Mobile Apps, Neurotransmitter uptake inhibitors, Polypharmacy, Psychopharmacology.