The frequency of psychotropic drug use in early‐onset Alzheimer’s disease ‐ experience from the Center for Memory Disorders in Serbia

Abstract

AbstractBackgroundNeuropsychiatric symptoms (NPS) occur frequently in patients with young onset Alzheimer’s Disease (YOAD). However, studies on psychotropic drug use (PDU) mainly focus on elderly patients with dementia. It is important to know the prevalence of PDU in patients with YOAD in order to reduce excess use of these medications in this group. Our study aim is to investigate the frequency of PDU among patients with YOAD.MethodThis is a retrospective study on 135 patientsfrom Memory Centre of Neurology Clinic, Clinical Centre of Serbia, with clinical diagnosis of YOAD. We included outpatients that had first visit to our clinic from 01.04.2012. to 01.04.2017. The data on psychotropic drug use werecollected from medical records. Statistical analyses were done using SPSS20.ResultMean age of our patients at inclusion was 60.07±5.27 and mean disease duration was 3.42±1.53. 85.18% patients received PT drugs. Antidepressants were prescribed most frequently, in 63.7% of patients, while antipsychotics were used by 45.93% of patients, and benzodiazepines by 61.5%. The earliest prescribed PTs were antidepressants, 3.66 years from the first symptoms and 1.45 years after diagnosis and antidepressants were used the longest in our group, 3.15 years.ConclusionThe frequency pf PDU in our cohort is high and comes close to PDU in patients in nursing homes in other European countries. The reason might be the high frequency of NPS in YOAD but also prescribing practice in the absence of systematic non pharmacological measures and that is something we have to take notice of.