File photo shows the silhouette of an elderly man. Reuters/File  They said people who took drugs that block acetylcholine —  a chemical messenger in the nervous system critical for memory  — functioned less well than their peers. “These results were true even in older adults who have  normal memory and thinking abilities,” said Dr. Kaycee Sink of  Wake Forest University School of Medicine in North Carolina,  who led the study of 3,000 people of whom 40 percent were  taking more than one anticholinergic drug. “The effect is essentially that of a three- to four-year  increase in age. So someone who is 75 in our study and taking  at least one moderately anticholinergic medication is at a  similar functional level to a 78 to 79-year-old,” Sink said in  an e-mail. Sink’s findings, presented at American Geriatrics Society  Meeting in Washington, add to a growing body of research that  suggests these so-called anticholinergic medications can hasten  functional and cognitive declines in elderly people. Some of the most common such drugs in the study included  the blood pressure drug nifedipine (sold as Adalat or  Procardia), the stomach antacid ranitidine or Zantac, both with  mild or moderate anticholinergic properties, and Pfizer Inc’s  incontinence drug tolterodine or Detrol, which is highly  anticholinergic. “The tricky part ... is that many useful drugs from many  different classes of medications have anticholinergic  properties,” Sink said. She said in many cases newer drugs are available that do  not have these effects and said doctors should look out for  them for elderly patients. Dr. Jack Tsao, a neurologist with the U.S. Navy, reported  last month at a American Academy of Neurology meeting that  elderly people who took anticholinergic drugs had a 50 percent  greater rate of memory decline than people in a long-term study  who did not take the drugs. Sink studied the effects of taking multiple anticholinergic  drugs on walking speed, basic activities such as dressing,  eating, taking care of personal hygiene, grooming, and harder  activities like shopping, cooking and managing money on her  test subjects whose average age was 78. The researchers found that the more anticholinergic drugs  people had in their systems, the worse their physical function,  based on reports from people in the study and on independent  measures of their performance. In a separate study this month in the Journal of the  American Geriatrics Society, Sink found that older nursing home  residents who took drugs for dementia and incontinence at the  same time had a 50 percent faster decline in function than  those treated only for dementia. “I would encourage patients to bring in a list of  everything they take (even over-the-counter medications) to  their doctor and have them review it at least yearly,” Sink  said. “Physicians should try to decrease anticholinergic burden  whenever possible.”
Common drugs hasten decline in elderly: study.