Health Care 101 Blog

According to experts, elderly people who are getting treatment/medication to overcome dementia associated with their relative age can result in death or hospitalization short after. The side effects of older and newer drugs were analyzed when researchers tried to find an explanation for the rash of deaths that were plaguing elderly communities in health care facilities/nursing homes finding that those who did receive the antipsychotic drugs are three times more likely to get hospitalized or even die due to long term side-effects of the drugs in question.

“Newer antipsychotic drugs (olanzapine, quetiapine fumarate and risperidone) have been on the market for more than a decade and are commonly used to treat the behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia,” the authors write as background information in the article.

The study recruited people in nursing homes as test subjects and their results did confirm that the adverse effects of individuals who received antipsychotics did have a higher risk of getting into health problems as a result of the drugs. Most elderly people who are confined to nursing homes are getting treated with antipsychotics to manage their often fragile health but compared to those who live outside of them they are more likely to die or get into serious health problems. The researchers are advising that these drugs be prescribed with caution till they get to the bottom of the problems as many follow-up testing and research is in order to establish better data.