START DATE AND DURATION: October 2019This project is looking at the effects of polypharmacy (taking multiple medications at the same time) in people living with multiple physical and mental health problems.
Multimorbidity in mental health and between mental and physical health is relatively under-researched. Both long-term physical and psychiatric disorders are associated with poverty and social inequality, but the relationship is not well understood. Prescribing is complicated by comorbidity – some medications may have detrimental effects on mental or physical health, or drug combinations may have detrimental effects.
In some instances, de-prescribing medication may be the optimal approach, but evidence for this is unlikely to come from randomised controlled trials and needs innovative approaches using data from large electronic health record databases.
