Patients with chronic diseases are at risk of having their long-term medications unintentionally discontinued after a hospital admission, a large study finds.
The Canadian study, published in JAMA, considered records from almost 400,000 patients aged 66 and older with at least one year of continuous use of either statins, levothyroxine, gastric acid-suppressing drugs, antiplatelet/anticoagulant agents or respiratory inhalers.
For each of these medication groups, patients who were admitted to hospital (187,912) were more likely to fail to renew a prescription within 90 days compared with those not hospitalised. This finding held after excluding patients who had clear contraindications to being on any of the drugs.
The highest discontinuation rates were with antiplatelet/anticoagulant agents, with 19.4% of patients discontinuing this treatment in the hospitalised...
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