SAGA VOICES
Each month our insight team conducts an in-depth poll of Saga customers to find out what you’re thinking. This month: your meds
‘Keep taking the tablets’ we used to say as a put-down in the school playground. And that’s exactly what we’re doing as we age: only 20% of Saga customers don’t take any daily prescription medication, while nearly half (47%) take up to three prescription drugs every day and 22% take five or more.
Unsurprisingly, our poll of 4,354 over-50s found that the older people got, the more prescription medicines they took: a third (36%) of 50 to 59-year-olds took none but that fell to 16% for those in their 70s. In their 60s, 57% took between one and four different drugs, but not many took more than five. By their 70s, 58% are taking between one and four pills and for 26% it’s five-plus. Yet, this is still below the national average. Surveys show one in ten over-65s take eight-plus medicines a day – but only one in 14 Saga customers over 65 take eight-plus.
We may worry about rattling round like a pill bottle but in some ways it’s a medical success story: doctors can now treat conditions that would have finished off our parents’ generation, and we’re benefiting from preventive medicines like statins. The most common medication taken is for high blood pressure (50%), followed by a statin (also 50%), heartburn/indigestion (20%), cardiovascular conditions (18%), painkillers (11%) and diabetes (11%). Most of our respondents feel happy with their prescriptions.
But there’s increasing concern that too many people are taking too many pills. Hospital admissions for medication-related problems have soared (along with the drugs budget), and there are questions on the benefits of ‘polypharmacy’, especially for older people. ‘The more you’re prescribed the more likely you are to get side effects and then have medicines prescribed for those side effects,’ says David Alldred, professor of medicines use and safety at Leeds University. ‘If you have a heart attack you will probably immediately be prescribed five medicines that we know reduce your chance of dying or having another heart attack. Those meds might, if you’re on water tablets for example, cause incontinence. Then meds are prescribed for incontinence, which may lower your blood pressure and cause a fall. This prescribing cascade is very common.’
And there can be reluctance to stop long-term medicines, he says, even though no one knows if the patient is still b
