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What is polypharmacy? A systematic review of definitions

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Masnoon, Nashwa, Shakib, Sepehr, Kalisch-Ellett, Lisa, Caughey, Gillian E.·2017·BMC Geriatrics
DOI 10.1186/s12877-017-0621-2
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Abstract

BACKGROUND: Multimorbidity and the associated use of multiple medicines (polypharmacy), is common in the older population. Despite this, there is no consensus definition for polypharmacy. A systematic review was conducted to identify and summarise polypharmacy definitions in existing literature. METHODS: The reporting of this systematic review conforms to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) checklist. MEDLINE (Ovid), EMBASE and Cochrane were systematically searched, as well as grey literature, to identify articles which defined the term polypharmacy (without any limits on the types of definitions) and were in English, published between 1st January 2000 and 30th May 2016. Definitions were categorised as i. numerical only (using the number of medications to define polypharmacy), ii. numerical with an associated duration of therapy or healthcare setting (such as during hospital stay) or iii. Descriptive (using a brief description to define polypharmacy). RESULTS: A total of 1156 articles were identified and 110 articles met the inclusion criteria. Articles not only defined polypharmacy but associated terms such as minor and major polypharmacy. As a result, a total of 138 definitions of polypharmacy and associated terms were obtained. There were 111 numerical only definitions (80.4% of all definitions), 15 numerical definitions which incorporated a duration of therapy or healthcare setting (10.9%) and 12 descriptive definitions (8.7%). The most commonly reported definition of polypharmacy was the numerical definition of five or more medications daily (n = 51, 46.4% of articles), with definitions ranging from two or more to 11 or more medicines. Only 6.4% of articles classified the distinction between appropriate and inappropriate polypharmacy, using descriptive definitions to make this distinction. CONCLUSIONS: Polypharmacy definitions were variable. Numerical definitions of polypharmacy did not account for specific comorbidities present and make it difficult to assess safety and appropriateness of therapy in the clinical setting.

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Cited by

See all 3,293

Metadata

Authors
Masnoon, N., Shakib, S., Kalisch-Ellett, L., & Caughey, G. E.
Venue
BMC Geriatrics
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Published
2017-10-10
Volume
17
Issue
1
Pages
230-230
ISSN
1471-2318 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1186/s12877-017-0621-2
OpenAlex
W2763920048
Cited by
3,293
References
0
FWCI
19.86
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
gold
Funders
Australian Government Funded Research Training Program Scholarship at the University of South Australia (Not applicable)

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

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How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: What is polypharmacy? A systematic review of definitions. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1186/s12877-017-0621-2
The paper
Masnoon, N., Shakib, S., Kalisch-Ellett, L., & Caughey, G. E. (2017). What is polypharmacy? A systematic review of definitions. BMC Geriatrics. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12877-017-0621-2

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.