What is anticholinergic burden? It’s fair to say that the treatment of long term conditions has much improved over the last 20 years with more evidence-based prescribing and the publication of Gold Standards in the guise of NICE guidance or other Gold Standard guidelines such as the BTS/SIGN guidelines for treating and managing Asthma. One down-side of this approach is the danger of treating patients as a collection of acute and long term conditions, managing each condition separately. This is exacerbated by long term conditions run by nurses or GPs that again focus on single conditions. All clinicians are aware of side effects and interactions as single entities but when this detrimental effect is due to the cumulative effects of a number of medications e.g. anticholinergic burden, awareness is much lower and this is a real opportunity for clinical pharmacists to improve outcomes for patients.
I’ve used the presentation below in my practice to introduce the subject and the GPs have been really enthusiastic about it. They even said it might be the answer to an unusual presentation of a number of patients!
Annticholinergic Burden
The intention is for this to be the first of a series of Clinical Posts that Clinical Pharmacists can use in practice. Feel free to comment and contribute
