Cardiovascular Pharmacotherapy in the Elderly

farmakoloji-11-2-2023-wos

Volkan AYDINa , N. İpek KIRMIZI SÖNMEZb , Ali Serdar FAKc

aİstanbul Medipol University International Faculty of Medicine, Department of Medical Pharmacology, İstanbul, Türkiye
bBahçeşehir University Faculty of Pharmacy, Department of Pharmacology, İstanbul, Türkiye
cMarmara University Hypertension and Atherosclerosis Research Center, İstanbul, Türkiye

ABSTRACT
Aging has a crucial role in the decline of cardiovascular functions, resulting in a high burden of cardiovascular disease in the elderly. Therefore, older patients represent a substantial part of the clinical trials investigating efficacy/safety of cardiovascular drugs, where sub-analyses by age groups usually yield comparable outcomes. This makes cardiac communities to follow overall same therapeutic strategies independent of the age. Nevertheless, elderly population is a highly heterogenous group with an incremental prevalence of multimorbidity and polypharmacy as the age increases. This contributes to underrepresentation of very old patients in clinical drug trials whose findings need to be cautiously extrapolated to this population in clinical practice. Pharmacological management of such patients should be tailored to their physiological status, frailty, pre-existing conditions, concomitant medications, and specific aspects of the drug in the elderly. In this article, we reviewed key considerations of the frequently used cardiovascular medications when prescribed for the elderly.
Keywords: Cardiovascular agents; antihypertensive agents; anticoagulants; platelet aggregation inhibitors; geriatrics

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