PREVALENCE OF POTENTIALLY INAPPROPRIATE MEDICINES FOR ELDERLY AMONG THE STANDARDIZED ONES IN THE REGIONAL UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL OF MARINGÁ ACCORDING TO THE BEERS-FICK RULES

Abstract

In Brazil, the demographic transition from young to old country was one of the fastest in the world. The metabolism of drugs in elderly individuals may be changed by various factors that are complicated by the presence of chronic diseases and eventually by acute pathological processes. This usually leads the elderly undergoing pharmacological treatment with many drugs. Some methods can be used to assess the pharmacological treatment of these people such as the Beers-Fick rules, which aims to identify potentially inappropriate medicines for elderly (PIM). The use of the PIM associated with many pharmacological therapy agents increases the incidence of adverse effects. In that way, the purpose of this study is to determine the prevalence of pharmaceutical products potentially inappropriate for the elderly, according to the Beers-Fick rules, in the Regional University Hospital of Maringá. We observed a high prevalence of these medicines (24%), containing several associated drugs with more than one type of side effects. The results suggest that although the Beers-Fick rules did not include certain drugs subject to adverse reactions, it has been helpful to identify most of these effects. The identification of these adverse reactions allows optimizing drug therapy and reducing health care costs, besides improving the quality of life of elderly patients.