SHORT COMMUNICATION How Drug Use by French Elderly Patients Has Changed During the Last Decade

The Author(s) 2015. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Background In France the most recent data on drug use by the elderly living at home were published in 2000. Since then the available drugs and their use have changed. Objective We compared data collected in 2011 with the 2000 data to evaluate how drug use has changed in France. Methods The study analysed retrospectively the 2011 data collected prospectively in France from a sample of 600,000 people representative (1/97th) of the French pop-ulation. All prescribed drugs reimbursed by the French national health insurance were recorded. Due to the reim-bursement procedure the unit of analysis was the trimester. The drugs were coded using the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) Classification System