Medications Archive

Keep important information handy, such as an advance directive, a list of medications, and your emergency contacts.

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We spend a lot of time trying to stay healthy. We exercise, eat right, and get check-ups and screenings. But how many of us take the time to prepare for a medical emergency, with the right information and equipment handy? "Most patients I see are not prepared to come to the emergency department [ED]. They don't know their medical problems. We're lucky if they carry their medications list," says Dr. Kei Ouchi, an emergency medicine physician at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital.

Maybe we're unprepared because of a natural tendency to think that medical emergencies may happen to others but not to us. But consider the numbers: in 2009–2010, about half of all adults ages 65 or older went to an emergency department, according to the CDC. "The number of older adults coming into the ED is increasing, especially near the end of life — 75% of older adults come to the ED at least once in their last six months," Dr. Ouchi says. Those odds may make you want to think twice about preparing for the unexpected.

For the best results and for your safety, learn what those new pills do and how you should use them.

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Medications play a crucial role in helping us get better or manage chronic disease. But don't sit silently when your doctor prescribes something new. Ask questions about the drug and bring unanswered questions to your pharmacist. "The doctor may not have the time to explain everything that's important, like whether to take a medicine on an empty stomach," says Joanne Doyle Petrongolo, a pharmacist at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital.

The next time your doctor suggests that you take a new pill, jot down answers to the following questions.

Research we're watching

Among people who have atrial fibrillation (afib), those who take anti-clotting medications may be less likely to develop dementia later in life than those who don't take the drugs, a new study finds.

Afib, a disorder marked by a rapid, irregular heartbeat, raises the risk of stroke as well as dementia. Anti-clotting drugs are known to lower the risk of stroke, but the drugs' effects on dementia weren't clear. So Swedish researchers examined hospital and pharmacy registry data from nearly half a million people who were diagnosed with afib between 2006 and 2014.

Precision medicine offers a personalized approach for prevention and treatment of cancer and other diseases.

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If you have a stomachache or cold, you go to the pharmacy and grab the same remedy that everyone else uses, and it often works. But is that always the best approach? Your reaction to an infection may be quite different from someone else's, so perhaps you need a treatment designed just for you and your ailment.

That's the philosophy behind precision medicine (sometimes referred to as personalized medicine), an emerging approach to prevention and treatment that takes into account a person's genes, environment, and lifestyle and eliminates the one-size-fits-all approach to health care.

In the journals

People who take prescription drugs do not always know about side effects that could increase their risk of driving accidents, suggests a study published online Oct. 31, 2017, by the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.

Researchers asked 7,405 drivers about their prescription drug use. Nearly 20% used medication that could affect their driving skills — for example, by causing drowsiness or impairing cognitive or motor function — yet almost all were unaware of these potential side effects. Either they did not receive or remember a warning from their doctor or pharmacist, or they did not recognize or recall a warning on the drug label.

Being vigilant about what you're taking can reduce your risk of a harmful drug reaction.

There's an old expression that the cure is sometimes worse than the disease. That rings true when it comes to a common problem in health care — medication errors.

Medication mix-ups and mistakes sometimes lead to harmful drug reactions, which cause about 700,000 emergency department visits and 100,000 hospital admissions each year, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

Research we're watching

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A new test might help doctors better treat patients with urinary tract infections, according to a study published in the Oct. 4, 2017, issue of Science Translational Medicine. These infections prompt some eight million doctor visits each year, and doctors often prescribe antibiotics to treat the condition. However, sometimes the bacteria they are attempting to treat are resistant to first-line antibiotics. The delay caused by the ineffective medication can, in some cases, cause the patient's condition to worsen and lead to complications. To eliminate this antibiotic guesswork, researchers developed a new quick-acting antimicrobial susceptibility test that not only tells the doctor within 30 minutes whether the patient has a urinary tract infection, but also what type of bacteria caused it and what drugs will best treat it. The test can also quickly identify cases where antibiotics aren't needed at all, preventing overuse of antibiotics, which can promote resistance. The same type of rapid testing, might eventually be of use in identifying the best anti-biotics for other types of bacterial infections as well.

News briefs

People with coronary artery disease or strong risk factors for developing it are often treated with statin drugs. Statins were developed to treat high levels of LDL (bad) cholesterol, because such high levels increase the risk of coronary artery disease. Studies convincingly showed that statins do indeed reduce both cholesterol and the risk of coronary artery disease, as expected. However, a large Harvard study published in 2008 found that statins also lowered the risk even in people with normal LDL levels. Why? Many doctors speculated that the reason might be that statins also reduce inflammation, another contributor to heart attacks and stroke. A new Harvard study, published online August 27, 2017, by The New England Journal of Medicine used a novel medication called canakinumab, which attacks inflammation but does not lower LDL cholesterol. The study involved over 10,000 people who had suffered a heart attack and whose blood showed a modest level of inflammation. The inflammation-fighting medicine lowered the rates of heart attacks, strokes, and death from heart disease. This study supports the theory that the beneficial effects of statins may result from their ability to both lower cholesterol and tamp down inflammation. It also will lead to further study of this new drug as well as other treatments for inflammation.