[When "deprescribing" drugs can improve the elderly patient's health].

Elderly people are frequently prescribed unnecessary and/or dangerous medications. The resulting polymedication carries four types of risk : an increased risk of adverse drug events (ADEs), decreased benefits of appropriate drugs, decreased compliance with appropriate treatments, and increased cost. Physicians should thus, when possible, deprescribe, reduce, replace or withdraw inappropriate medications. This article examines the following questions: Which medications can be stopped? What are the risks? How best to withdraw undesirable drugs? What are the potential health benefits for elderly people? When should drugs not be deprescribed? How to promote controlled trials aimed at optimizing the duration of treatments, especially in elderly people? and How to educate prescribers, pharmacists and patients in deprescription?