Balancing risk versus benefit: the elderly patient's perspective on warfarin therapy.

Unlabelled: Warfarin therapy is underused in the target at-risk elderly population. Clinicians perceive that older patients are reluctant to use this therapy, however the perspective of patients or their carers has yet to be explored.

Objective: To explore in-depth the perspectives of elderly patients and/or their carers regarding the use of warfarin therapy.

Clinical implications of changes in hepatic drug metabolism in older people.

Prescribing for older people is challenging because of the paucity of clinical trial evidence of therapeutic benefit in this population and the presence of evidence that older people are at increased risk of adverse drug reactions. The outcomes of pharmacotherapies in older people depend on age-related changes in both pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics. Of the pharmacokinetic changes, those in hepatic metabolism are the most significant.

Failure to weigh patients in hospital: a medication safety risk.

Often patients are not weighed in hospital. Failure to weigh patients prescribed renally excreted drugs may correlate to adverse drug events. We carried out a cross-sectional study of patients prescribed common renally excreted drugs (heparin, enoxaparin and gentamicin), admitted to two wards at Royal North Shore Hospital, Sydney over 3 months.