Comparison of Beers Criteria with START/STOPP Criteria for Detecting Potentially Inappropriate Medications in a Geriatric Setting

Abstract

Potentially Inappropriate Medications and Adverse Drug Events combined with several Age- related risk Factors and other comorbidity conditions in the elderly group can increase the risk factors of drug-drug interactions with the patient life style. To tackle the rising issue of PIM’s (Potentially inappropriate medications) in primary geriatric care the use of detection tools is applied, such detection tool are Beer’s criteria and STOPP (Screening Tool of Older Persons’ Prescriptions) and START (Screening Tool to Alert to Right Treatment) criteria. This paper focuses on the comparison of the aforementioned techniques and assess whether which of the techniques are better for the suggested population. For this, the methods used was an extensive search in various biomedical databases like PubMed, Google scholar and Cochrane to obtain various literatures which focused on the objectives, reliability and validity of the use of Beer’s & START/STOPP PIM’s detection techniques in the primary geriatric setting. The result of the study made it understandable that to tackle the problems of Polypharmacy, Adverse drug events, and aid in reducing the average medical cost in a geriatric primary care setting the preferred tool would be the START/STOPP criteria for an Indian based Geriatric setting.