The WSJ Health Blog is carrying this item pointing to this expose in The Wall Street Journal
Nursing homes are loading up patients on antipsychotic drugs and regulators have started to take notice, the WSJ reports.
Almost a third of patients in nursing homes are receiving powerful antipsychotic drugs, the feds say. And patients can be given the medicines, whether they are psychotic or not. The drugs are often used to calm demented patients, some with Alzheimer’s disease, and to help maintain order in nursing homes, which are often understaffed and reluctant to use physical restraints. But the FDA hasn’t approved the drugs for these uses, compounding the ethical questions.
Nearly 21% of the nursing-home patients who receive the drugs don’t have a psychosis diagnosis and some think that’s too much. “You walk into facilities where you see residents slumped over in their wheelchairs, their heads are hanging, and they’re out of it, and that is unacceptable,” says Christie Teigland, director of informatics research for the New York Association of Homes and Services for the Aging, a not-for-profit industry group.
Commenting on the WSJ article, the blog Furious Seasons notes that the “numbers are alarming, especially since there is no scientific proof that these drugs work well in dementia patients and are, in fact, outperformed by placebo,” according to a federally funded study known as CATIE.
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