Taking Multiple Medications? You May Need to Scale Back.

Around one in five adults between the ages of 40 to 79 is taking five or more prescription drugs, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And the older patients are, the more likely it is they're taking even more medications.

But taking many medicines simultaneously, known among medical experts as polypharmacy, increases people's risk of experiencing severe side effects and drug interactions, said Dr. Nina Blachman, an associate professor of medicine and geriatrics at the N.Y.U. Grossman School of Medicine.

Studies show that taking multiple medications is associated with a faster decline in memory in some patients with mild cognitive impairment, and with a greater risk of falls among people with balance problems or weakened muscles. And certain combinations of drugs can lead to excessive bleeding, dangerously low blood sugar or other serious complications that lead to hundreds of older adults being hospitalized every day.

While medicines can be critical for improving our quality of life, it is important to understand how people end up taking too many drugs unnecessarily and when to ask for help trimming your prescription list.

How prescriptions can pile up

As people age, they develop more health issues such as diabetes, heart disease, arthritis and high blood pressure, and "end up on more and more medications," Dr. Blachman said. Many are never taken off the drugs they've been prescribed for years, even if they no longer need them or if there are newer formulations available that can treat different symptoms simultaneously.

Patients sometimes also see a variety of medical providers, each of whom may prescribe medication without necessarily communicating with one another.

Sometimes medical professionals may prescribe drugs to treat the side effects of another medication, in what doctors refer to as a "prescription cascade." For example, people who take certain over-the-counter pain medicines called nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs may experience an increase in blood pressure, which doctors may misdiagnose as a new ailment and prescribe calcium channel blockers as a treatment. But in some people, these blood pressure drugs can lead to ankle swelling, which may then lead to a prescription for a diuretic to reduce fluid buildup in the body.

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