Elderly people's compliance with prescriptions, and quality of medication.

We set out to examine how quality of medication influenced patients' use of drugs. 217 elderly people living in homes for the aged in Helsinki were interviewed. They used a considerable number of prescribed drugs: one-third of them had ingested at least four different prescribed drugs during the previous week. This polypharmacy largely concerned symptomatic drugs. Non-compliance with prescription instructions was common, and was more common with the symptomatic drugs. The number of deviations from the instructions correlated positively with the number of drugs, especially the number of symptomatic drugs. According to this study, non-compliance with prescription instructions is not to be condemned as such. In so far as drugs are prescribed in unreasonable large quantities, underuse is a way for the patient to avoid ingesting excessive quantities of drugs.