Objective:

To determine the association between polypharmacy and multiple health-related outcomes in older adults.

Materials and methods:

We carried out a cross-sectional analysis with 274 community-dwelling older adults aged ≥60 years in Mexico City. We used the following health-related outcomes: frailty, dementia, functional capacity, falls, disability, and quality of life. The main exposure was polypharmacy (chronic use of six or more drugs). Ordinal logistic regression, binary logistic regression, Poisson regression, and linear regression models were used to estimate the association between polypharmacy and the outcomes analyzed.

Results:

Polypharmacy was present in 45% of the sample. Polypharmacy was significantly associated with frailty status, and marginally, with dementia. We also observed significant associations for instrumental activities of daily living, falls, disability, and quality of life.

Conclusions:

Given that polypharmacy has reached levels of a global epidemic, it is necessary to take radical actions to reduce the concomitant problems of the use of multiple drugs.