Polypragmasy: A clinical pharmacologist’s view

Abstract

In the modern world, there is a rapid advance in the design and clinical introduction of a huge number of drugs that are able to cure a patient or to improve his/her health status on the one hand and to cause significant harm to his/her health on the other. Polypragmasy is the desire to enhance the efficiency of treatment and to help the patient recover from all developed diseases inevitably leads to the use of a large number of medications. At the present time, polypragmasy as a result of iatrogenia is a serious public health problem, as it is clinically manifested by a reduction in the effectiveness of pharmacotherapy, by the development of severe adverse drug reactions, and by a considerable increase in healthcare expenditures. The reason for the simultaneous prescription of multiple drugs may be comorbidity (multimorbidity), the availability of drugs, as well as clinical guidelines, manuals of professional medical associations, treatment standards that contain recommendations for using combination therapy with more than 5 drugs for only one disease in some cases, the efficiency of which corresponds to a high level of evidence. Currently, the fight against polypragmasy is one of the important tasks in rendering medical care to elderly and senile patients since it is a major risk factor of adverse drug reactions in this category of people. To minimize polypragmasy in elderly patients, it is necessary to use current methods for analyzing each prescription of a drug (the index of rational drug prescribing; an anticholinergic burden scale) and those for optimizing pharmacotherapy with the use of restrictive lists (Beers criteria, STOPP/START criteria) that will be able to reduce the number of errors in the administration of drugs and to maximize the efficiency and safety of pharmacotherapy.