Older adults' attitudes towards deprescribing and medication changes: a longitudinal sub-study of a cluster randomised controlled trial

Abstract

Objective: To investigate the association between older patients' willingness to have one or more medications deprescribed and: (1) change in medications, (2) change in the appropriateness of medications and (3) implementation of prescribing recommendations generated by the electronic decision support system tested in the 'Optimising PharmacoTherapy In the Multimorbid Elderly in Primary CAre' (OPTICA) trial.

Design: A longitudinal sub-study of the OPTICA trial, a cluster randomised controlled trial.

Setting: Swiss primary care settings.

Participants: Participants were aged ≥65 years, with ≥3 chronic conditions and ≥5 regular medications recruited from 43 general practitioner (GP) practices.

Exposures: Patients' willingness to have medications deprescribed was assessed using three questions from the 'revised Patient Attitudes Towards Deprescribing' (rPATD) questionnaire and its concerns about stopping score.

Measures/analyses: Medication-related outcomes were collected at 1 year follow-up. Aim 1 outcome: change in the number of long-term medications between baseline and 12 month follow-up. Aim 2 outcome: change in medication appropriateness (Medication Appropriateness Index). Aim 3 outcome: binary variable on whether any prescribing recommendation generated during the OPTICA medication review was implemented. We used multilevel linear regression analyses (aim 1 and aim 2) and multilevel logistic regression analyses (aim 3). Models were adjusted for sociodemographic variables and the clustering effect at GP level.

Results: 298 patients completed the rPATD, 45% were women and 78 years was the median age. A statistically significant association was found between the concerns about stopping score and the change in the number of medications over time (per 1-unit increase in the score the average number of medications use was 0.65 higher; 95% CI: 0.08 to 1.22). Other than that we did not find evidence for statistically significant associations between patients' agreement with deprescribing and medication-related outcomes.

Conclusions: We did not find evidence for an association between most measures of patient agreement with deprescribing and medication-related outcomes over 1 year.

Trial registration number: NCT03724539.

Keywords: Aged; Chronic Disease; Health Services; Primary Health Care; Surveys and Questionnaires.