Canada must deal with harmful drugs for seniors with national strategy: study
VANCOUVER — Canada urgently needs a national strategy to ensure seniors are prescribed appropriate medications because the cost of giving them the wrong drugs has reached nearly $2 billion a year, a new study says.
Prof. Steve Morgan of the University of British Columbia said physiological changes associated with aging alter the effects of many medications, meaning older adults shouldn’t be taking them.
The study is published in CMAJ Open, an open-access journal of the Canadian Medical Association, and includes prescription data from six provinces.
Morgan said the cost of non-beneficial seniors’ drugs and hospitalization to deal with their effects, amounts to about $420 million a year in B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and Prince Edward Island. Extrapolated to the rest of the country, Morgan estimates the cost at nearly $2 billion.