Noll Campbell, PharmD, M.S., discusses the factors that could be leading to higher rates of dementia diagnoses in African-American communities.
Transcript:
We recognize from epidemiologic data that African-Americans are disproportionately diagnosed with dementia diagnoses, but we also recognize that the African-American populations also suffer from higher burden of comorbid disease, largely cardiovascular disease. They’re also because of that, prescribed medicines or high-risk medicines — in this case, tricyclic antidepressants — at a higher rate than Caucasians. And so it begs the question of what contributing factors are there that could be leading to higher rates of dementia diagnoses? Is it disease or is it medication? And those become important questions over time, because of the modifiability of either the diagnosis or the medicines. It’s really difficult to modify a diagnosis, but it’s within our control to modify the types of medicines they’re using to manage those disease states. So we think that there’s an opportunity to make better choices about medicines and what medicines people use for long periods of time to reduce future harm.
Dr. Campbell’s recent study looks at how often prescriptions of high-risk medications are reevaulated.
Transcript:
We believe it’s important to study prescribing patterns of high-risk medicines so that we can understand how often we’re considering alternative medicines, instead of the set-it-and-forget-it type of prescribing. And one of the things that we’re trying to identify in this project was to understand in routine clinical care, can we identify any activity where it looks like a medicine was started and then decreased or stopped or deprescribed to see if it was actually effective. And we found very little evidence that routine deprescribing to test whether medicines are actually effective over long periods of time is actually occurring in the clinical care environment.
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