Polypharmacy in the Over 60s
- Submission status
- Open
- Submission deadline
Polypharmacy, the use of multiple prescription medicines, is an increasing public health concern given that it is associated with complications in older people including increased risk of falls, side effects, and drug-drug interactions that reduce medication benefit. With an ageing population, increasingly diagnosed with multiple chronic conditions, management of appropriate treatment can be complex. Avoidance of unnecessary prescriptions is important in order to ensure that older people do not suffer unnecessarily from illness due to excessive, inappropriate, or inadequate medicine consumption.
To reduce the risk of inappropriate prescribing, healthcare providers require improved decision making tools and more information on medication optimization. Patients also benefit from education that increases their confidence in continuing or discontinuing medication and their quality of life can also be improved through assessment of treatment adherence failure and simplification of medication management.
This Collection will bring together primary research that considers incidence of polypharmacy and its impact on patients over 60 or evaluates interventions to reduce inappropriate prescription.
Editors
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Wegdan Bani-issa, PhD
University of Sharjah, UAE
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Pankaj Bhardwaj, MD
School of Public Health at AIIMS Jodhpur, India
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Shang-Ming Zhou, PhD
University of Plymouth, UK
Wegdan Bani-issa PhD, University of Sharjah, UAE
Prof. Bani-issa finished her Bachelor in nursing Science from Jordan University of Science and Technology and her masters in nursing science from University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada. She obtained her PhD from the University of Kansas Medical Center, USA. She is specialized in adult and population health. Bani-issa has several publications and national and international grants in the areas of adolescents’ health, public health and women’s’ health. She is a valuable member of the nursing community and is making significant contributions to advancing healthcare in her region and beyond.
Pankaj Bhardwaj, MD, School of Public Health at AIIMS Jodhpur, India
Pankaj Bhardwaj is currently working as Professor in Community & Family Medicine and as Head, School of Public Health at AIIMS Jodhpur. His area of interests is Implementation Research, Geriatrics, Life course immunizations and Global Health. He has been an Editorial Board Member for Scientific Reports since 2024.
Shang-Ming Zhou, PhD, University of Plymouth, UK
Shang-Ming Zhou is a Professor and Deputy Director of the Centre for Health Technology at the Faculty of Health, University of Plymouth, UK. His research interests include AI with electronic health data for personalised medicine, disease phenotyping, polypharmacy, multimorbidity, risk factors identification etc; clinical decision supports driven by type-1 OWA operators and type-2 OWA operators; machine learning and data mining applied to epidemiology and public health. Shang-Ming has been an Editorial Board Member for Scientific Reports since 2022.
