The elderly population suffers more drug-drug interactions (DDI), drugdisease
interactions (DDE) and adverse drug reactions (ADR) than other age groups.
The main risk factor is the high number of drugs administered. The use of psychotropic
medications is very high in elderly individuals, especially in residents of nursing homes.
A lot of the clinically relevant DDI involve a psychotropic drug. Besides, their medical
care implies multiple professionals from different specialties and psychotropic drugs
may interact with other prescribed medications used to treat concomitant medical
illnesses. Moreover, the amount of time dedicated to their attention is usually
insufficient. All these circumstances extremely complicate the possibility to detect DDI
while prescribing. This is the reason why we consider electronic programs an
indispensable help for this task. Anyway, physicians should have a basic knowledge of
the main mechanisms implicated in DDI and of those DDI clinically relevant.
Keywords: Aged, Anticonvulsants, Antidepressive Agents, Antiparkinson agents,
Antipsychotic Agents, Computer-assisted, drug Interactions, Drug therapy,
Electronic prescribing, Food-Drug Interactions, frail elderly, Health Services for
the aged, Herb-Drug Interactions, Inappropriate Prescribing, Medical Informatics,
Medical Order Entry Systems, Mobile Applications, Mobile Apps,
Neurotransmitter uptake inhibitors, Polypharmacy, Psychopharmacology.
