TY  - JOUR
A1  - Krüger, Caroline
A1  - Schäfer, Ingmar
A1  - Bussche, Hendrik van den
A1  - Baehr, Michael
A1  - Bickel, Horst
A1  - Fuchs, Angela
A1  - Gensichen, Jochen
A1  - Maier, Wolfgang
A1  - Riedel-Heller, Steffi Gerlinde
A1  - König, Hans-Helmut
A1  - Dahlhaus, Anne Maren
A1  - Schön, Gerhard
A1  - Weyerer, Siegfried
A1  - Wiese, Birgitt
A1  - Renteln-Kruse, Wolfgang von
A1  - Langebrake, Claudia
A1  - Scherer, Martin
T1  - Non-random relations in drug use expressed as patterns comprising prescription and over-the-counter drugs in multimorbid elderly patients in primary care: Data of the exploratory analysis of the multicentre, observational cohort study MultiCare
T2  - European journal of general practice
N2  - Background: The elderly population deals with multimorbidity (three chronic conditions) and increasinged drug use with age. A comprehensive characterisation of the medication – including prescription and over-the-counter (OTC) drugs – of elderly patients in primary care is still insufficient.
Objectives: This study aims to characterise the medication (prescription and OTC) of multimorbid elderly patients in primary care and living at home by identifying drug patterns to evaluate the relationship between drugs and drug groups and reveal associations with recently published multimorbidity clusters of the same cohort.
Methods: MultiCare was a multicentre, prospective, observational cohort study of 3189 multimorbid patients aged 65 to 85 years in primary care in Germany. Patients and general practitioners were interviewed between 2008 and 2009. Drug patterns were identified using exploratory factor analysis. The relations between the drug patterns with the three multimorbidity clusters were analysed with Spearman-Rank-Correlation.
Results: Patients (59.3% female) used in mean 7.7 drugs; in total 24,535 drugs (23.7% OTC) were detected. Five drug patterns for men (drugs for obstructive pulmonary diseases (D-OPD), drugs for coronary heart diseases and hypertension (D-CHD), drugs for osteoporosis (D-Osteo), drugs for heart failure and drugs for pain) and four drug patterns for women (D-Osteo, D-CHD, D-OPD and drugs for diuretics and gout) were detected. Significant associations between multimorbidity clusters and drug patterns were detectable (D-CHD and CMD: male: ρ = 0.376, CI 0.322–0.430; female: ρ = 0.301, CI 0.624–0.340).
Conclusion: The drug patterns demonstrate non-random relations in drug use in multimorbid elderly patients and systematic associations between drug patterns and multimorbidity clusters were found in primary care.
KW  - Pharmacotherapy
KW  - geriatrics
KW  - multimorbidity
KW  - polypharmacy
KW  - primary care
Y1  - 2021
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/62789
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-627890
SN  - 1751-1402
N1  - The work was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research under the grant [numbers 01ET0725-31 and 01ET1006A-K].
VL  - 27.2021
IS  - 1
SP  - 119
EP  - 129
PB  - Informa Healthcare/Taylor & Francis
CY  - Philadelphia, Pa.
ER  -