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Dementia patients often exhibit psychotic behaviors that warrant conservative treatment and medication interventions. The recent recognition that initiation of either typical or atypical antipsychotic medication increases the risk for death in this population led to an FDA black-box warning on these products. Now, researchers have retrospectively studied antipsychotic-associated risk for myocardial infarction (MI) among more than 37,000 Canadian patients ≥66 years of age already receiving cholinesterase inhibitors to treat dementia.
Nearly 30% of the patients received antipsychotic prescriptions during the study period (2000–2009). The risk for MI during the first 30 days after antipsychotic initiation was double that of patients who didn't …