The prescribing cascade

in this issue…This year's top ten drug lists show that thousands of Australians are taking drugs to lower cholesterol.Jane Smith thinks there may be some inappropriate prescribing which may lead to unnecessary adverse effects.All medicines can cause adverse effects.Sometimes another drug is prescribed to treat these adverse effects and this could result in a prescribing cascade, according to Lisa Kalisch and colleagues.one way to manage a prescribing cascade is to 'deprescribe', and David Le Couteur and his co-authors advise us how to do this.The new drugs for osteoporosis reviewed by Peter Ebeling have a range of adverse effects.Whether these drugs have long-term advantages over oral bisphosphonates is not yet known.