Medicines
Benzodiazepines: overuse in the elderly
Many elderly people are prescribed benzodiazepine. But a new study suggests it’s given too often and has too many negative side-effects.
Using sleeping pills and tranquillisers increases with age and is greater among women. | Image: iStock
Some practices have an unfavourable cost-effectiveness ratio. This is of interest to Joachim Marti, a health economist at the University of Lausanne. With his team, he has studied the extent of benzodiazepine prescription in Switzerland among 69,000 people aged 65 and over. Based on data recorded by a health insurance company, he analysed, among other things, the relationships among the use of these drugs, the frequency of hospitalisation and the cost incurred during the year 2017. According to his observations, 20 percent of the people monitored received at least one prescription for benzodiazepines. Another conclusion is that the use of these drugs increases with age and is higher among women. People treated with benzodiazepines are also more likely to be hospitalised for accidents, resulting in health insurance costs that are 70 percent higher than for untreated people. According to Marti’s hypotheses, the overuse of these drugs, estimated at 16 percent among the elderly participants in the study, could be linked to the tendency to prescribe this inexpensive treatment, which has good perceived short-term efficacy. In the medium and long term, however, scientists are currently unclear on the therapeutic benefits, noting a feeling of absence and the high risk of addiction, and the pronounced adverse effects, particularly in the elderly: slower metabolism, memory problems, cognitive disorders and risk of falls. Benzodiazepines may therefore share similarities with opioids, but only specific studies on this subject will provide more answers.
Marti suggests some ways of tackling this problem. “The key point is to identify in whom these drugs are really effective. In the future, we would also like to follow patients to gain a better understanding of certain particularities, in particular the different prescription practices between the French and German-speaking parts of Switzerland”.
