Ida Canapp insists she would take her five medications and two vitamin pills every day, whether or not a nurse's aide came to her Parkville home to monitor her.
But her niece, Renee Gowland of Monkton, knows this is the dementia talking. "She wouldn't take them. Or she wouldn't know if she was taking the a.m. or the p.m. [doses]."
At 82, Canapp is energetic, hospitable and fiercely independent - with the help of Aricept, a drug that tempers the effects of mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease. But Canapp, who also has diabetes, high cholesterol and high blood pressure, and who takes a daily antidepressant, is like many older people with chronic health problems: She has difficulty keeping up with her many medications.
Medication mismanagement among seniors is a growing problem in the United States. Some experts estimate that half of all seniors mismanage one or more of their medications, and seniors are twice as likely to end up in emergency rooms because of drug safety issues.
As the baby boom generation ages - and older Americans take more medications to deal with chronic illnesses - medical professionals have become increasingly concerned about the issue.
"Not only is it getting worse, it has become one of the major sources of hospitalizations in the country and one of the greatest preventable causes of illnesses - and costs associated with illnesses - in this country," said George Lowe, director of medical services at the Overlea Physicians medical clinic in Northeast Baltimore. About 60 percent of his patients are seniors.
Not all seniors have memory problems as severe as Canapp's. But many have trouble keeping up with prescriptions because they can't see as well as they used to. Or they're confused by taking so many prescriptions, or from following different doctors' various treatment plans, or by multiple instructions on the pill bottles: Take this medicine with food. Take that one on an empty stomach. Take this one three times a day. Take that one twice.
Consequently, many seniors don't take enough medicine or take too much, experts said. Sometimes they skip doses, or stop taking a medication altogether because they just can't figure out when or how to take it. Doctors call this "noncompliance," and say it can lead to additional or more severe health problems in seniors, a loss of independence, sometimes even death.
