TY - JOUR T1 - Deprescribing in polypharmacy: a process to evaluate, question and terminate drug treatment in the elderly JF - European Journal of Hospital Pharmacy JO - Eur J Hosp Pharm SP - 137 LP - 137 DO - 10.1136/ejhpharm-2017-001265 VL - 24 IS - 3 AU - Tommy Eriksson Y1 - 2017/05/01 UR - http://ejhp.bmj.com/content/24/3/137.abstract N2 - The key to rational drug therapy is to continuously evaluate and appraise medications prescribed for an individual patient. This is especially important for elderly patients who may have multiple diseases and many medicines. Ongoing evaluation of the potential and real benefit as well as harms (problems) of medication taken by the patients is fundamental to the pharmacist’s provision of pharmaceutical care. Curative and short-term emergency treatments such as antibiotics are probably not the major problem. More focus is needed on preventive treatments and on medicines with doubtful or no approved indication for the treatment. Symptom relief drugs with uncertain or poor evidence of clinical benefit must also be evaluated. Table 1 can be used as a tool for this assessment.1 View this table:In this windowIn a new windowTable 1 (Data from Lundgren … Correspondence to Dr Tommy Eriksson, Department of Clinical Pharmacology, Laboratory Medicine, Lund University, Lunds universitet box 188, Lund 221 00, Sweden; tommy.eriksson{at}mah.se ER -