A prescribing study found benzodiazepine derivatives among common drug groups in patients with polypharmacy. Its percentages did not describe all Spanish adults.
The study used primary-care data for people aged fifteen or older meeting a definition of at least five drugs during at least six months. Medication profiles in 2005 and 2015 were compared by age and sex.
Several cardiovascular and psychotropic categories were prominent, and changes differed across demographic groups. Benzodiazepine derivatives were one component of these wider profiles.
Conditioning on polypharmacy selects a population with substantial medication and illness burden. A common drug in that group is not necessarily equally common among all residents or all patients with one diagnosis.
Prescription records do not establish every administered dose or the appropriateness of each combination. The cross-sectional comparisons also do not follow the same individual’s causal response to an added drug. The paper supports medication-review questions, but cannot attribute a particular fall, cognitive symptom, or interaction to benzodiazepines from prevalence alone.
Original analysis of the supplied journal article, identified as PMC8125508.