Benzodiazepine and z-hypnotic use in Norwegian elderly, aged 65-79
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose: Benzodiazepines/z-hypnotics (BZD-Z) guidelines suggest that elderly people ought to use anxiolytic benzodiazepines (BZD) and z-hypnotics only at low dose and only for a short time, and that hypnotic BZD not should be used at all. Since the elderly aged 65-79 tend to be recently retired but still in relatively good health, they may have different needs for BZD-Z than those older or younger. Our objective is to examine BZD-Z use in this age group.Methods: The study population consisted of Norwegians, aged 65-79, who filled prescriptions for anxiolytic BZD, hypnotic BZD and/or z-hypnotics in 2004-2009. The quantities prescribed were in daily defined doses (DDD), and 100 DDD/year was deemed excessive.Results: More than a quarter of the population received at least one BZD-Z prescription each year. Half of those received more than 100 DDD/year and a quarter received over 250 DDD/year, with these proportions increasing year by year. All three subgroups of BZD-Z showed increasing use with age and all except anxiolytic BZD showed increasing proportions of users using more than 100 DDD/year with age.Conclusions: Substantial numbers of elderly aged 65-79 receive prescriptions for BZD-Z, more with increasing age, and greater amounts per user. Guidelines are clearly ignored. While a rigid enforcement of guidelines/rules is not the answer, allowing the status quo to continue shows lack of respect for guidelines.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".