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Several researchers have developed lists of drugs that older patients should avoid. These lists have been used as criteria to evaluate the quality of drug prescribing. To explore whether published criteria are usually sensible in specific cases, researchers with expertise in geriatric prescribing interviewed — and reviewed the records of — 256 older outpatients who overall were taking 3678 medications. The researchers made individualized judgments about each medication's appropriateness and assessed those judgments against published appropriateness criteria (i.e., the Beers criteria and Zhan criteria).
About half the prescribed drugs that were deemed inappropriate by published criteria were deemed acceptable by the expert case reviewers when…