Polypharmacy Definitions for Multimorbid Older Adults Need Stronger Foundations to Guide Research, Clinical Practice and Public Health
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
There are numerous definitions of polypharmacy to describe the use of many medications among older adults, but there is a need to clarify if they are purposive and meaningful. By means of a systematic review, we identified definitions of polypharmacy used in multimorbid older adults (≥65 years). We evaluated if the definitions align among the domains of research, clinical practice, and public health and appraised whether concepts of polypharmacy are based on strong foundations. More than 46 definitions of polypharmacy were retrieved from 348 publications (research: n = 243; clinical practice: n = 88; public health: n = 17). Several thresholds based on the number of medications were mentioned. The majority of the publications (n = 202, 58%) used a minimal threshold of five medications. Heterogeneous qualitative definitions were identified, mostly stating that polypharmacy is “more drugs than needed”. There was no significant divergence between domains as to the type of definitions used, although qualitative definitions were more common in clinical practice. Nearly half (n = 156, 47%) of the publications provided no justification for the polypharmacy definition used. The wide variety of definitions for polypharmacy precludes comparisons, appropriate identification and management of polypharmacy in multimorbid older adults. Standardized definitions would allow more coherent judgments regarding the individual and collective stakes of polypharmacy.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
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 it