ANTIPSYCHOTICS put older adults with dementia at a greater risk of death or hospitalisation and should be prescribed with caution, researchers say. For community-dwelling elderly people with dementia, both conventional and atypical antipsychotics were associated with a more than tripling of the risk of a serious adverse event within 30 days of initiating treatment, compared with controls, the retrospective cohort study found.The pattern of serious events was similar but less pronounced among older adults living in a nursing home,” the authors wrote in the Archives ofInternal Medicine (26 May).Antipsychotics were often prescribed around the time of nursing home admission and some guidelines recommended them for short-term treatment of delirium, despite there being no RCT evidence to support this practice, they...
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