Many Primary Care Doctors Are Still Prescribing Sedative Drugs for Older Adults

A University of Michigan study found many primary care doctors in the United States are still prescribing sedatives to older adults despite warnings of risk of injury and death, reports News-Medical . The researchers analyzed data about all prescriptions written in 2015 by primary care providers for enrollees in the Medicare Part D prescription drug program, along with county-level health and socioeconomic data from the County Health Rankings project. In 2015, 122,054 primary care providers prescribed 728 million days' worth of benzodiazepines to Part D beneficiaries at a cost of $200 million. Alabama, Tennessee, West Virginia, Florida, and Louisiana had the highest intensity of prescribing, while benzodiazepines comprised 2.3 percent of all medication days prescribed to Part D participants by providers in 2015. Primary care doctors constituted 62 percent of that total, and higher sedative prescription intensity also was linked at the county level with more days of poor mental health, a higher percentage of disability-eligible Medicare beneficiaries, and a larger suicide rate. Moreover, doctors with higher percentages of white beneficiaries, or who received the "Extra Help" payments available to low-income, low-resource Part D beneficiaries, were more likely to be high-intensity sedative prescribers.