Cancer patients and primary care prescribed medications: offering insights into symptoms, polypharmacy and multimorbidity

Abstract

BackgroundNational Cancer Registration and Analysis Service (NCRAS) are responsible for registering data on all cases of cancer. For the first time individual patient level prescribing data is available, offering potential unique insights into treatment and co-morbidity.AimTo investigate the patterns of polypharmacy in cancer patients compared to non-cancer patients.MethodPrimary care prescriptions data (electronic and FP10) is currently available from April to July 2015 inclusive. Unique prescription items were summarised for each registered cancer patient; with an initial focus on opioids. These summaries were broken down by age of the patient at prescription for the most common cancers (invasive breast, colorectal, lung and prostate). Non-cancer patients were used as a comparisonResultsOverall 1,680,764 cancer patients were dispensed prescriptions during the period. On average, patients diagnosed with breast, colorectal, prostate and lung cancers received 7, 8, 8 and 10 unique drugs, respectively, throughout the 4 months. In all cases 2 of these unique drugs were opioids. In comparison, patients not diagnosed with cancer received 4 unique drugs on average: of which 2 were unique opioid drugs. Cancer patients aged 0–39, 40–69 and 70+, at prescription date, received 4, 6 and 8 unique prescriptions respectively compared to 3, 5 and 7, for non-cancer patients.ConclusionThis provides insight into primary care polypharmacy for all cancer patients in England. Analysis is underway to assess the cumulative dosage of unique drugs that patients receive, and the potential use of the data as a marker of polypharmacy/co-morbidity with larger patient level datasets.