Louise Aronson

Louise Aronson's new book is Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life.

From the transcript of her Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross:

GROSS: As a geriatrician, one of the things you have to deal with is that your patients are probably mostly on multiple medications, dealing with multiple problems. And you have to make sure that the medications are balanced and they're not having bad interactions with each other. And sometimes the symptoms they come and see you with are probably side effects of the medication. And also, older people respond differently to certain medications. What are some examples of that? 'Cause I think it's really useful to know what those medications are.

ARONSON: Absolutely. Well, older people respond somewhat differently to, actually, most medications because the way the body handles a medication depends on its being metabolized, generally in the liver or kidney. And those functions tend to decline or change with age. It's also the medication is affecting the rest of the body. That's what we hope for. But the rest of the body is also different. So any medication - this is one of the hard and fast rules of geriatric medicine - any medication can do anything, (laughter), in an older person. And I've had experiences. So a new blood thinner came out a few years ago, and a grandson called me about his grandmother to say, well, she's - it was a Saturday, and he said, she's so confused. She's just not herself. What should we do?

And I asked a variety of questions about any indication of infection or new problems, and there really weren't any. So the other critical question is, any new or changed medicines? And she was on this new blood thinner. Now, he said he'd looked on the Internet, as did I, to see if this reaction was listed, and it was not. But critically, the vast majority of medicines, although given to older adults since older adults have more diseases, are not tested in older adults. So researchers have traditionally said, well, we're not going to include older people in our studies because their bodies are different, and or because they have other ailments that might interfere with their reaction to this medicine. But then they give the medicine to those same older people, which is most older people.

And so very frequently with a new medicine, we will see...[read on]

Visit Louise Aronson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue