[Cardiovascular drugs in aged and multimorbid patients]

Cardiovascular diseases, such as arterial hypertension, heart failure, coronary artery disease, peripheral circulatory problems and atrial fibrillation are increasingly present in aged patients. Comorbidities, mainly diabetes, renal dysfunction, chronic bronchitis and degenerative joint diseases, are also frequent and need additional drug treatment. The usual polypharmacy often causes side effects due to overdosage and/or drug interactions. The main difficulty in choosing the proper therapeutic regimen consists in the lack of suitable dosing guidelines with adapted therapeutic targets for the older multimorbid population, usually not represented in the large controlled trials forming the basis of general recommendations. European guidelines for hypertension and heart failure are discussed as examples.