Millions of people taking common prescription medicines for conditions including high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol have been warned about the risks of taking multiple medications over many years. Dr Amir Khan has raised concerns about overprescribing and the number of patients experiencing side effects from combinations of medicines, including statins, ramipril and metformin. The GP said more than eight million people are currently taking five or more medications, while hundreds of thousands are taking 10 or more. He warned that the issue, known as polypharmacy, is contributing to hospital admissions linked to medication side effects.
“It’s resulting in about a thousand hospital admissions due to side effects of medication,” Dr Khan said. “Now we do have a term for this. It’s called polypharmacy.
“Anyone who’s on five medications or more is called polypharmacy. It’s not automatically a bad thing because lots of people are on medication that are keeping them alive and well.”
Dr Khan stressed that patients should not stop taking prescribed medicines without speaking to a healthcare professional. He explained that people who started taking medication for high blood pressure, diabetes or heart problems in their 50s or 60s may still be taking the same prescriptions decades later, despite changes to their health.
“The problem we have is that often people start these medications in their 50s and 60s and are still on them in their 80s as well,” he said.
“So the prescription stays the same, but the person has changed over that time. Their kidney function may have changed, their weight may have changed, their liver function. All of these things that drugs rely on to break down and work could have changed resulting in more side effects. And that’s the issue.”
The doctor also warned that medication side effects can sometimes be mistaken for entirely new illnesses, potentially leading to patients being prescribed even more drugs.
He said older people were particularly vulnerable, with symptoms caused by existing medication sometimes being treated with additional tablets rather than recognised as side effects.
Dr Khan said: “So the other thing is older people are more prone to these side effects, they come in and see doctors and they rather than saying this is a side effect of the medication, they treat it as a new illness and get a new tablet for it as well.
“And they could be under a specialist who gives them another tablet for that.”
He believes a more joined-up approach is needed, with doctors and pharmacists looking at patients’ overall health and reviewing whether every medicine remains necessary.
Dr Khan described this process as “deprescribing”, explaining that it involves carefully assessing medication and removing medicines that are no longer needed.
“But I think the key people to do all of this is pharmacists in GP surgeries. We’re getting more and more of them. They are brilliant at looking at which medications need to stay on, which ones can come off,” he said.
