Crimes In U.S. Nursing Homes

         

Prescription Abuse Seen In U.S. Nursing Homes

Powerful Antipsychotics Used to Subdue Elderly; Huge Medicaid Expense

By LUCETTE LAGNADO
December 4, 2007; Page A1

In recent years, Medicaid has spent more money on antipsychotic drugs for Americans than on any other class of pharmaceuticals -- including antibiotics, AIDS drugs or medicine to treat high-blood pressure.

One reason: Nursing homes across the U.S. are giving these drugs to elderly patients to quiet symptoms of Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia.

Nearly 30% of the total nursing-home population is receiving antipsychotic drugs, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, known as CMS. In a practice known as "off label" use of prescription drugs, patients can get these powerful medicines whether they are psychotic or not. CMS says nearly 21% of nursing-home patients who don't have a psychosis diagnosis are on antipsychotic drugs.

That is what happened to a woman listed in New York state health department inspection records as Resident #18. The 84-year-old Alzheimer's patient, who lives at the Orchard Manor nursing home in Medina, N.Y., likes to wander and roll her wheelchair around her unit, according to a report filed earlier this year, and sometimes she nervously taps her foot.

To address her behavior, which was considered disruptive, Resident #18 was given a powerful antipsychotic drug called Seroquel, a drug approved for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Resident #18 is not psychotic and Seroquel -- like other atypical antipsychotics -- carries a "black box" warning that elderly dementia patients using it face a higher risk of death.

"She is a handful," says Thomas Morien, administrator of Orchard Manor. "Other residents complain about her because often at night, she will get up and go to their rooms." The patient has since been taken off the drugs.

The growing off-label use of antipsychotic medicines in the elderly is coming under fire from regulators, academics, patient advocates and even some in the nursing-home industry.

"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. Her research, which she believes reflects national trends, shows that about one-third of dementia patients in New York's nursing homes are on antipsychotics; some facilities have rates as high as 60% to 70%. "These drugs are being given way too much to this frail elderly population," Dr. Teigland says.

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