Older People More Likely to Remember Pills

ANN ARBOR, Mich. —  Older really may be wiser, at least when it comes to remembering doses of medicine.

A University of Michigan study suggests that harried baby boomers are more likely than older patients to forget to take their prescriptions.

“Being too busy, not being old, is what leads people to make mistakes in taking their medications,” said Denise C. Park, a psychologist at the university’s Institute for Social Research who presented her findings recently at the annual meeting of the International Congress of Applied Psychology.

Conventional wisdom holds that as people age, they don’t take their medicine as prescribed--while their need to handle complicated medication schedules increases.

That’s not what the “Busy Life Style Questionnaire” found.

For eight weeks, researchers studied 121 men and women between the ages of 34 and 84, all of them with moderately severe rheumatoid arthritis. Participants in the study took four types of medication, on average.

Participants were tested to determine their levels of depression and anxiety, and their attitudes about arthritis and disease in general. They also received tests measuring their memory, recall and other areas of mental functioning.

Rheumatoid arthritis was selected because people with that disease could be expected to take their medicine, Park said.

People in the study got their prescriptions in containers with caps containing tiny electronic monitoring chips, which recorded exactly when the bottles were opened.

Overall, the research showed nearly 40% of participants didn’t make a single medication error during the two months. Of all the mistakes that were made, more than 98% were errors of omission; only 1.2% took an extra dose.

Fully 47% of those over the age of 55 made no mistakes, compared with only 28% of those between the ages of 34 and 54.

What usually led to mistakes was being too busy, the study found.