Psychiatric drugs tied to falls in the elderly

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Seniors taking psychiatric drugs may be at extra high risk for falling, new Dutch research suggests.

Of about 400 elderly people in the study, those who took medications including antidepressants and antipsychotics were twice as likely to report having fallen three or more times in the previous year, researchers found.

The new study can't prove that falls were due to the effects of the drugs, themselves, and not to seniors' underlying medical conditions, for example.

But a number of side effects of psychiatric drugs - from changes in thinking and attention to drops in blood pressure - could put elderly people at greater risk for falls, according to Dr. Allen Huang, head of geriatrics at The Ottawa Hospital and the University of Ottawa in Ontario, Canada.

"In my clinical observation, it's usually the first two weeks when people start something new that bad things happen," said Huang, who has studied psychiatric drugs in older adults but wasn't involved in the new research.

Seniors are especially vulnerable to falls, which at their worst can cause hip fractures, head injuries or death.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 20,000 U.S. seniors died in 2009 as a result of injuries from falls.

"If possible (psychiatric drugs) should be avoided for elderly patients with other risk factors for falling," Astrid van Strien, of University Medical Center, Utrecht, and colleagues wrote in the journal Maturitas.

Their study included 404 people visiting a geriatric clinic in the Netherlands for a range of reasons, from mental impairment to incontinence. On surveys, 238 of the seniors said they had fallen at least once in the past year.

Among the one-third of participants taking psychiatric drugs, 45 percent had fallen three or more times. That compared to just under 22 percent of those who weren't taking a psychiatric drug and reported frequent falls.

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Psychiatric drugs tied to falls in the elderly