Potentially inappropriate prescribing in a population of frail elderly people.

Background Frailty is a clinical syndrome highly predictive of functional decline after a stress or a medical event, such as adverse drug events. Objective To describe the prevalence of potentially inappropriate prescribing in a population of frail elderly patients. Setting Geriatric day hospital for assessment of frailty and prevention of disability, Toulouse, France. Method A cross-sectional study performed from January to April 2014. Two pharmacists retrospectively analyzed the prescriptions of elderly patients who were sent to the day hospital to assess their frailty and to be given a personalized plan of care and prevention. Potentially inappropriate prescribing was defined by combining explicit criteria: Laroche list, screening tool of older people's prescriptions, and screening tool to alert to right treatment with an implicit method (drug utilization review for each medication). Prescriptions' optimizations were then suggested to the geriatricians of the day hospital and classified according to criteria defined by the French Society of Clinical Pharmacy. Main outcome measure Prevalence of potentially inappropriate prescribing. Results Among the 229 patients included, 71.2% had potentially inappropriate prescribing. 76 patients (33.2%) had at least one drug without any valid indication. 51 (22.3%) had at least one drug with an unfavorable benefit-to-risk ratio according to their clinical and biological data, 42 (18.3%) according to the Laroche list and 38 (16.6%) had at least one drug with questionable efficacy. Conclusion Our work shows that the incidence of PIP is high in the frail elderly and that, in most cases, it could be avoided with an adequate and regular reassessment of the prescriptions. In future, prescription optimization will be integrated into the personalized medical care plan to further prevent drug-related disability.

Drug-drug interactions with imatinib: An observational study.

Many patients treated with imatinib, used in cancer treatment, are using several other drugs that could interact with imatinib. Our aim was to study all the drug-drug interactions (DDIs) observed in patients treated with imatinib.We performed 2 observational studies, between the 1st January 2012 and the 31st August 2015 in the Midi-Pyrénées area (South Western France), using the French health insurance reimbursement database and then the French Pharmacovigilance Database (FPVD).A total of 544 patients received at least 1 reimbursement for imatinib. Among them, 486 (89.3%) had at least 1 drug that could potentially interact with imatinib. Paracetamol was the most frequent drug involved (77.4%). Proton pump inhibitors, dexamethasone and levothyroxine, were found in >10% of patients. In the FPVD, among a total of 25 reports of ADRs with imatinib recorded in the Midi-Pyrénées area, 10 (40%) had potential DDIs with imatinib. Imatinib was most frequently prescribed by hospital physicians and drugs interacting with imatinib, by general practitioners.Our study showed that at least 40% of the patients treated with imatinib were at risk of DDIs and that all prescribers must be cautious with DDIs in patients treated with imatinib. During imatinib treatment, we particularly recommend to limit the dose of paracetamol at 1300 mg per day, to avoid the use of dexamethasone, and to double the dose of levothyroxine.