Medication errors in Parkinson's disease inpatients in the Basque Country.

Introduction: Parkinson's disease (PD) medication errors, including both missing dopaminergic drug doses and antidopaminergic usage, have been suggested as risk factors for prolonged hospital stays. The objective of this study was to evaluate the prevalence of such errors in PD patients admitted to public acute-care hospitals in the Basque Country over a two year period and their association with clinically relevant adverse health outcomes, such as length of hospital stay and mortality.

Methods: All PD patients admitted to any of the 11 public acute-care hospitals in the Basque Country in 2011-2012 were included.

Probable interaction between acenocoumarol and levofloxacin: a case series.

What Is Known And Objective: To report five cases with a probable interaction between acenocoumarol and levofloxacin.

Case Description: In five patients on long-term acenocoumarol treatment who had had stable international normalized ratios for at least 6 months, sudden erratic changes in the values of these ratios were observed after 1.5-8 days of concomitant levofloxacin treatment with no other apparent cause.

Anticholinergic burden in Parkinson's disease inpatients.

Purpose: Anticholinergic toxicity can arise as a result of the cumulative burden of multiple medications and metabolites rather than be caused by a single compound. In this sense, prescribing drugs with anticholinergic properties to Parkinson's disease (PD) patients could contribute to aggravate some frequent problems of the disease, like dementia, urinary retention, falls, or constipation, among others. The main purpose of this article is to measure the total anticholinergic burden in a group of PD inpatients.