Discontinuing drug treatments

We need better evidence to guide deprescribing Deprescribing is the process of withdrawing drugs in an attempt to improve patient outcomes. Emerging evidence from studies of patients with multimorbidity and older people, who are a large and growing proportion of the population, shows that deprescribing may be linked to improvements in survival and quality of life.1 2 While it is sometimes asserted that patients are unwilling to have their drugs withdrawn, in a recent survey over 90% of patients reported that they would be willing to stop taking one or more of their medicines.3 Deprescribing should be considered during every regular review of a patient. The principles of prescribing and deprescribing are highly comparable,4 although with obvious differences. Prescribing new drugs involves diagnosing a problem and establishing an indication; deprescribing involves establishing which drug may be causing a problem (an adverse drug event) or which drug does not have a current indication. Prescribing involves applying specific disease based guidelines to a patient; deprescribing involves optimising all treatments to achieve individual care goals. While prescribing for people with multimorbidity is commonly driven by guidelines that are based on single diseases, the …