Abstract
Anticholinergic drugs may increase the risk of serious respiratory infection, especially in the elderly. The study aims to investigate the prevalence of anticholinergic drugs and the correlation of incident pneumonia associated with the use of anticholinergic drugs among the elderly in Taiwan. The study population was 275,005 elderly patients aged ≥65 years old, selected from the longitudinal health insurance database (LHID) in 2016. Among all the elderly patients, about 60% had received anticholinergic medication at least once. Furthermore, the study selected elderly patients who had not been diagnosed with pneumonia and had not received any anticholinergic drugs in the past year in order to evaluate the correlation between pneumonia and anticholinergic drugs. The study excluded elderly patients who died or had received related drugs of incident pneumonia during the study period and selected elderly patients receiving anticholinergic drugs as the case group. Propensity score matching (PSM) on a 1:1 scale was used to match elderly patients that were not receiving any anticholinergic drugs as the control group, resulting in a final sample of 32,215 patients receiving anticholinergic drugs and 32,215 patients not receiving any anticholinergic drugs. Conditional logistic regression was used to estimate the association between anticholinergic drugs and pneumonia after controlling for potential confounders. Compared with patients not receiving anticholinergic drugs, the adjusted odds ratio of patients receiving anticholinergic drugs was 1.33 (95% confidence interval: 1.18 to 1.49). Anticholinergic medication is common among elderly patients in Taiwan. Elderly patients receiving anticholinergic drugs may increase their risk of incident pneumonia. The safety of anticholinergic drugs in the elderly should be of concern in Taiwan.
Highlights
Anticholinergic drugs act centrally and peripherally on muscarinic acetylcholine receptors.Cimetidine, metoclopramide, and ranitidine are commonly employed in the treatment of the urinary bladder, the respiratory tract, and gastroesophageal disease via the intervention of the muscarinicInt
We used the standardized mean difference to examine the balance of case and control groups after matching
Our study demonstrates thatwith anticholinergic drugscase–control are related to inincident pneumonia estimated anticholinergic drug exposure and the risk of pneumonia
Summary
The main purpose of our study was to explore the potential relationship between the risk of pneumonia and anticholinergic drug use in the elderly in Taiwan
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