Prescription cascade is the process whereby the side effects of drugs are misdiagnosed as symptoms of another problem, resulting in further prescriptions and further side effects and unanticipated drug interactions, which itself may lead to further symptoms and further misdiagnoses.
Because chronic illness increases with advancing age, older people are more likely to have conditions that require drug treatment, and they are more likely to suffer the effects of a prescription cascade.
[2] A prescriber can do little to modify age-related physiological changes when trying to minimize the likelihood that an older person will develop an adverse drug reaction.
Suffering a range of issues from short-term medical conditions to chronic conditions like diabetes or high blood pressure, the older patient may be medicated by a variety of drugs at one time.
More specifically, work from Australia has identified that 16% of older people use medicines that are part of a prescribing cascade.