According to a recent study, it has been revealed that patients with chronic diseases have a larger risk of discontinuing their medications unintentionally after they are admitted to the hospital.

The research was conducted by a team from Canada, and there were about 400, 000 people aged 66 or more. It was revealed that these patients went off their medicines unknowingly, after having continued their treatment with statins, anti-depressants, respiratory inhalers, and so on, even after having used them continuously for more than a year.

From each of these medicine groups, the patients were, for some reason, incapable of providing a renewed prescription within the 90 days period. The most number of cases in discontinuation was seen in anticoagulant and antiplatelets agents. About 19.4% people tend to discontinue the treatments upon hospitalization. On the other hand, the non-hospitalized group saw merely 11% of discontinuation.

This was mainly because their treatments for their chronic diseases sometimes seem to clash with the medicines give to them in the hospitals.

“Even if some of the discontinuation was intentional, the remaining unintentional discontinuation is of concerning scope and scale”, said the author of the report.