A Longitudinal Study of the Use and Effects of Fall-Risk-Increasing Drugs in Residential Aged Care.

OBJECTIVES

Fall-risk-increasing drugs (FRIDs)-psychotropics and cardiovascular disease (CVD) drugs-may elevate the risk of falling, with strong evidence observed in psychotropic FRIDs, whereas findings from cardiovascular disease (CVD) FRIDs remain inconclusive. Existing studies on FRIDs and falls are often hampered by methodologic limitations. Leveraging longitudinal observational data, we aimed to determine the long-term patterns of FRID use and their association with falls in residential aged care (RAC) homes.

DESIGN

A retrospective longitudinal cohort study.

SETTING AND

PARTICIPANTS

A total of 4207 permanent residents newly admitted to 27 RAC homes in Sydney, Australia.

METHOD: The outcomes were incidence of all and injurious falls. We measured exposure to each FRID over 60 months using the Proportion of Days Covered (PDC) metric. We used group-based multitrajectory modeling to determine concurrent usage patterns of psychotropics and CVD FRIDs and applied negative binomial regression to assess their associations with the outcomes.

RESULTS

A total of 83.6% (n = 3516) and 77.3% (n = 3254) residents used psychotropic and CVD FRIDs, respectively. The PDC values ranged from 67.3% (opioids) to 86.9% (antidepressants) for specific psychotropics and 79.0% (α-adrenoceptor antagonists) to 89.6% (β blockers) for CVD FRIDs. We identified 4 groups: group 1, low psychotropics-low CVDs use (16.7%, n = 701); group 2, low psychotropics-high CVDs (25.0%, n = 1054); group 3, high psychotropics-high CVDs (41.0%, n = 1723); and group 4, high psychotropics-low CVDs (17.3%, n = 729). Group 4 had a significantly higher rate of falls than the other groups for both outcomes, including relative to group 3, in which exposure to both FRID classes was high.

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: Our findings reveal concerningly high FRID use in RAC homes and highlight a critical difference in the impact of the 2 major FRID classes on falls. Psychotropics were strongly associated with falls, whereas the studied CVD FRIDs did not elevate risk of falling.