Health Outcome Priorities Among OAs Connected to Willingness to Deprescribe

Older adults’ (OAs) willingness to deprescribe is correlated to health outcome priorities related to medications, concluded authors based on results from a cross-sectional survey.

The survey, conducted between March and April 2020, focused on either preventive medicines or symptom-relief medicines and whether participants would be willing to stop each medication if it was recommended by their doctor.

Participants were asked to rate their level of agreement using 2 health outcome priorities statements: (1) “I am willing to accept the risk of future side effects … to feel better now;” or (2) “I would prefer to take fewer medicines, even if … I may not live as long or may have bothersome symptoms sometimes.”

Associations between baseline characteristics, health outcome priorities, and willingness to stop each medicine was determined by researchers utilizing ordinal logistic regression.

For this survey, 835 (70%) of the 1193 panel members aged 65 years or older invited to participate completed the survey. The mean age of respondents was 73 years. Of all the respondents, 124 (15%) reported taking a prescription sedative-hypnotic, while 496 (59%) had taken a statin.

Results showed 419 participants (50%) were willing to stop symptom-relief medicines, whereas 380 (46%) were “maybe” willing.

Higher odds of being willing to stop symptom-relief medicines (aOR 1.43 [95% CI 1.02-2.00]) and preventive medicines (aOR 1.52 [95% CI 1.05–2.18]) were linked to prioritizing fewer medicines.

Lower odds of being willing to stop symptom-relief medicines (aOR 0.62 [95% CI 0.39-1.00]) was linked to the current over future prioritization. A lower willingness to stop preventive medicines (aOR 0.66 [95% CI 0.48-0.91]) was associated with prior or current use of statins.

“Future research should determine how best to elicit patients' health outcome priorities to facilitate goal-concordant decisions about medication use,” concluded researchers.

Reference:
Green AR, Aschmann H, Boyd CM, Schoenborn N. Association between willingness to deprescribe and health outcome priorities among US older adults: results of a national survey. J Am Geriatr Soc. Published online June 6, 2022. doi:10.1111/jgs.17917