Increasing prevalence of anticholinergic medication use in older people in England over 20 years: cognitive function and ageing study I and II

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Anticholinergic medication use is linked with increased cognitive decline, dementia, falls and mortality, and their use should be limited in older people. Here we estimate the prevalence of anticholinergic use in England's older population in 1991 and 2011, and describe changes in use by participant's age, sex, cognition and disability. METHODS: We compared data from participants aged 65+ years from the Cognitive Function and Ageing Studies (CFAS I and II), collected during 1990-1993 (N = 7635) and 2008-2011 (N = 7762). We estimated the prevalence of potent anticholinergic use (Anticholinergic Cognitive Burden [ACB] score = 3) and average anticholinergic burden (sum of ACB scores), using inverse probability weights standardised to the 2011 UK population. These were stratified by age, sex, Mini-Mental State Examination score, and activities of daily living (ADL) or instrumental ADL (IADL) disability. RESULTS: Prevalence of potent anticholinergic use increased from 5.7% (95% Confidence Interval [CI] 5.2-6.3%) of the older population in 1990-93 to 9.9% (9.3-10.7%) in 2008-11, adjusted odds ratio of 1.90 (95% CI 1.67-2.16). People with clinically significant cognitive impairment (MMSE [Mini Mental State Examination] 21 or less) were the heaviest users of potent anticholinergics in CFAS II (16.5% [95% CI 12.0-22.3%]). Large increases in the prevalence of the use medication with 'any' anticholinergic activity were seen in older people with clinically significant cognitive impairment (53.3% in CFAS I to 71.5% in CFAS II). CONCLUSIONS: Use of potent anticholinergic medications nearly doubled in England's older population over 20 years with some of the greatest increases amongst those particularly vulnerable to anticholinergic side-effects.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12877-020-01657-x
Divisions: College of Health & Life Sciences > Aston Pharmacy School
College of Health & Life Sciences > Chronic and Communicable Conditions
College of Health & Life Sciences
Additional Information: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. Funding: This research was supported by funding from Alzheimer’s Society (AS-PG-2013-017). The funder had no role in the design, implementation, analysis or interpretation of the study.
Uncontrolled Keywords: Anticholinergic burden,Cognitive impairment,Geriatrics and Gerontology
Publication ISSN: 1471-2318
Last Modified: 04 Mar 2024 17:02
Date Deposited: 04 Aug 2020 12:45
Full Text Link:
Related URLs: https://bmcgeri ... 877-020-01657-x (Publisher URL)
http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK (Scopus URL)
PURE Output Type: Article
Published Date: 2020-07-31
Published Online Date: 2020-07-31
Accepted Date: 2020-07-16
Authors: Grossi, Carlota M.
Richardson, Kathryn
Savva, George M.
Fox, Chris
Arthur, Antony
Loke, Yoon K.
Steel, Nicholas
Brayne, Carol
Matthews, Fiona E.
Robinson, Louise
Myint, Phyo K.
Maidment, Ian D. (ORCID Profile 0000-0003-4152-9704)

Download

[img]

Version: Published Version

License: Creative Commons Attribution

| Preview

Export / Share Citation


Statistics

Additional statistics for this record