Professor William Rosenberg, WHP Chair, explains how harnessing the power of genomics has real potential to help address the growing issue of polypharmacy in the elderly
“In Wessex we have an older population. Often the elderly have multiple long term conditions, and end up being prescribed several different medications by their GP, and specialists, to help manage these problems. This is known as polypharmacy. It’s not always a bad thing, but taking multiple medications does increase risk.
More people are taking more medicines than ever, and this trend will continue as people live longer – but not necessarily healthier lives – making polypharmacy a significant public health challenge.
Polypharmacy can also affect children and young adults, those living with deprivation, people with mental health issues and those with learning difficulties. It’s impacting hospitals, hospices, care homes and prisons, as well as people in their own homes, and the homeless.
Here at Wessex Health Partners, we want to apply genomics to the problems raised by polypharmacy. All the time in genetic medicine, we’re increasing our understanding of how genes contribute to individual health and disease risk. Genomics takes this further to look at a person’s genetic information to see how best to treat people at an individual level. In other words, personalised medicine.
Having brought together the right people in our region, with the right skills, we’re now working towards shaping a research question and applying for a programme grant to address the problem of polypharmacy in the elderly. If successful, we will be able to run a very large, multi-disciplinary, high impact project with the hope of improving the health and wellbeing of our population, learning lessons that will have global impact.
Without saying too much at this stage, our idea is to develop a better blood test. This will enable us to tailor prescriptions to the needs of individual patients, to minimise adverse effects, and maximise health and economic benefits. Using the results, GPs will have the right information to be able to review and adjust prescriptions to optimise them to the benefits of patients.
This means we will be helping individuals, as well as the health and care system – optimising prescriptions, cutting down on unnecessary medication, and bringing cost and efficiency savings. If we can get this right, this project has global potential, capturing the essence of what we do at Wessex Health Partners.
The video includes interviews with my colleagues working on this project. Please do watch if you can, and thank you for reading."
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