Outcomes associated with prescribed medications in older adults with multimorbidity: protocol for a scoping review

Multimorbidity becomes increasingly prevalent with ageing. Polypharmacy is often associated with multimorbidity because patients accrue medications to treat each individual disease; however, there is uncertainty around the generalisability of disease-specific guidelines. Namely, the extrapolation of results from studies conducted in younger patients to older adults with multimorbidity. The main objective of this scoping review is to explore our current knowledge of the outcomes that older adults with multimorbidity experience from taking prescribed medications.

A scoping review will be conducted to explore what is known about the outcomes experienced by older adults with multimorbidity who are taking guideline-recommended medications and to identify areas for future research. In addition to searching the grey literature, the following databases will be searched from 1990 onward: MEDLINE, EMBASE, PsycINFO and the Cochrane Library. Experimental, quasi-experimental and non-experimental studies consisting of patients ≥65 years old who have two or more comorbid conditions (explicitly grouped together for the purpose of analysis) and who are being prescribed a guideline-recommended prescription medication for a chronic condition will be considered for inclusion in our scoping review. We will describe patient (eg, mortality, morbidity, quality of life) and health system (eg, number of emergency department visits or hospitalisations, cost to third-party payer) outcomes associated with the prescription of medications for older adults who have two or more chronic comorbid conditions. Two reviewers will complete all screening and data abstraction independently. Data will be synthesised with descriptive statistics.

Ethics approval is not required because this is a scoping review of published literature. Results will be disseminated through conference presentations and publication in a peer-reviewed journal.