Polipharmacy in Elder people. Challenges and solutions

Abstract

Polipharmacy, defined as the consumption of more than three medicinal products, is one of the most frequent situations with implications related to morbi-mortality in elder people due to physiological changes affecting the medicinal product distribution: alterations of the intestinal motility, gastric pH intensification, decrease of the esplacnic flow and active intestinal transportation of substances like iron or B12 vitamins, changes in the distribution due to decrease of total body water, reduction of the body lean mass and total proteins affecting the transportation linked to them; therefore the necessity of a highly trained professional care. For all that we carried out a bibliographic review in Infomed databases and chose 46 scientific articles fulfilling the search criteria, finding 29 bibliographic references; 79.32 % of the bibliography corresponded to the last five years. The authors pretend make their contributions to the good clinical practices of the professionals involved in elder people care.