Impact of Clinical Pharmacist Intervention towards Polypharmacy in Elderly population-A Systematic Study

Abstract

Polypharmacy is a common practice in elderly patients afflicted with multiple chronic conditions and is also one of the reason for various consequences like increased incidence of adverse drug reactions, decreased medication adherence and quality of life. In order to improve this condition the pharmacists have taken certain interventional measures like Medication therapy management services, educational interventions for patients. These interventions have decrease the total number of drugs taken in addition to the number of doses taken per day, decrease in the ADR, increase in medication adherence. Our objective was to carry out a study which could assess the impact of Clinical Pharmacist interventions towards polypharmacy in elderly population. A systematic study was carried out in which we included 12 articles published in MEDLINE from a period of 2010–2017. The keywords used to carry out the search were polypharmacy, intervention, deprescribing, economic outcome. Interventions were carried out on a total of 3998 patients studied from the 12 articles, we observed that 1554 patients (10 studies) showed an improvement in Clinical outcomes, whereas Humanistic outcomes were improved in 911 patients (4 studies), economic outcomes were improved in about 2694 patients (6 studies).Our study concludes that interventions carried out by pharmacist to reduce polypharmacy had a beneficial impact in the improvement on the health-care of the elderly populations.