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The Article in Brief
Comparative Associations Between Measures of Anticholinergic Burden and Adverse Clinical Outcomes
Fei-Yuan Hsiao , and colleagues
Background Anticholinergic burden is the cumulative effect of using multiple medications that block the effects of acetylcholine in the body. Medications with anticholinergic properties comprise 30 to 50 percent of all medications commonly prescribed to older adults. This is the first study to examine the association between long-term (10 years) anticholinergic burden and adverse clinical outcomes by comparing different measurement scales of anticholinergic burden.
What This Study Found Anticholinergic burden assessed with the Anticholinergic Cognitive Burden Scale consistently shows dose-response relationships with a variety of adverse outcomes. In a study of long-term associations between adverse clinical outcomes in older adults and three scales for anticholinergic burden, the ACB scale showed the strongest, most consistent dose-response relationships with risk of all four adverse outcomes studied: emergency department visits, all-cause hospitalizations, hospitalizations for fractures, and incident dementia.
Implications
- The authors suggest that the ACB scale may be a useful tool to identify high-risk populations for future research.