Survey on Benzodiazepine Prescriptions

Benzodiazepines (BZDs) are frequently prescribed for the treatment of sleep disturbances,depression,anxiety syndromes and various somatoform disorders in the elderly.The daily doses of BZDs for elderly patients should be low enough to avoid the adverse effects.However,the actual situation of prescribing BZDs in Japan has not been fully elucidated.We,therefore.,analyzed 56,192 prescriptions including BZDs (23 BZDs including the non-BZD hypnotics,zolpidem and zopiclone) for 6,777 patients at Tsukuba University Hospital using Data Warehouse,a knowledge base technology.Fifty-four percent of prescriptions including BZDs were from departments other than psychiatry,and 33.8% were for patients over 65 years old.Prescriptions for elderly patients from the psychiatry department were less frequent than those from other departments (18.4 vs.47.2%).While 83% of BZDs prescribed for elderly patients were short-acting BZDs,longacting BZDs were prescribed more frequently by the psychiatry department than others (41.2 vs.16.7%).Intentional dose reduction of BZDs for elderly patients was observed only for etizolam.Our results suggested that BZDs except for etizolam were prescribed without dose reduction to elderly patients in the departments other than psychiatry.