Researchers at Indiana University found that women and seniors who take multiple medications are more likely to experience dangerous drug interactions. For women, there was a sixty percent increase in the risk of drug interactions compared to men. With people over fifty-five, one in four people take drugs that can cause an adverse reaction. For people seventy through seventy-nine, that risk goes up to one in three people.

Women and Seniors are More Likely to Experience Dangerous Drug Interactions

The project was done in the Brazillian health care system and published npj Digital Medicine. 181 drug combinations that were prescribed against recommendation was discovered. The drugs were all widely known to interact poorly with one another and given to 15,527 people in the study’s population. 5,000 people got drug combinations that would cause them to need medical attention if something were to go wrong.

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, about one out of three hospital visits in a year are due to side effects of drugs.

The medication that appeared to be most commonly prescribed in bad combinations were relatively normal medications. Familiar names like omeprazole—a heartburn medication also known as Prilosec, fluoxetine—an antidepressant also known as Prozac, and ibuprofen— a type of aspirin were the top drugs prescribed.

Researchers made sure to take in other factors that could result in dangerous drug interactions, like older people taking more prescription drugs. The study compared drugs actually prescribed to older patients against a random selection of medicines that are used among older adults. This would show that dangerous drug combos were more common in real life than in the random model.

Further research will be done to dive further into this subject.

Read more about the study here.