Stopping Polypharmacy

As a doctor, and as someone who cared for my grandmother who suffered from Alzheimer's disease, I have became aware of a common issue.

Many people with dementia, and indeed many elderly people generally, are on a large number of medications. On average an 80-year-old takes 8 different drugs.

I often ask myself: "Are all these drugs really necessary?"

And in fact, being on a large number of drugs leads to several problems:

• The drugs may interact in an unpredictable way to cause harmful side effects.
• Taking the drugs is an unpleasant daily routine, for the person and their carers.
• Drug costs are a financial burden.

Many doctors are reluctant to reduce the number of drugs that a patient is taking for a number of different reasons:

• They do not want to de-prescribe a drug started by a colleague.
• They do not see the patient often enough to review the drugs.
• They do not want to deal with the ethical questions of treating a dementia patient differently from a non-dementia sufferer.

The proposed software is to help carers and doctors address this problem.

They can type in the list of medications taken by a dementia suffer and immediately find out what other people and doctors think of the list. It will show which drugs are important and which ones can probably be stopped. Hopefully this will significantly reduce the number of drugs that a dementia sufferer needs to take.

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