Four peer-reviewed articles were chosen to research the topic. The first article is “Associations of polypharmacy and inappropriate medications with adverse outcomes in older adults with cancer: A systematic review and meta-analysis” (Mohamed et al., 2020). The second article is called “A systematic overview of systematic reviews evaluating interventions addressing polypharmacy” by Anderson et al. (2019). The third study is “Potentially inappropriate prescriptions according to explicit and implicit criteria in patients with multimorbidity and polypharmacy. MULTIPAP: A cross-sectional study” (Lopez-Rodriguez et al., 2020).
The final article is called “A nurse practitioner led protocol to address polypharmacy in long-term care” by Bergman-Evans (2020). All these articles were chosen for the investigation because they are related to the primary clinical issues of interest, namely polypharmacy, and cover different aspects of its application. Polypharmacy can be a controversial method to use in patients’ treatment and have specific ethics of research since different drug regimens are complex for patient treatment, and the usage of multiple medicines might bring adverse effects (Gurwitz et al., 2018).
The first study is aimed to systematically review the associations of polypharmacy (PP) and/or potentially inappropriate medications with different results and get estimations of postoperative outcomes related to PP in older adults with cancer (Mohamed et al., 2020). The second article’s main objective is to systematically assess and summarize data across multiple systematic reviews (SRs) investigating the treatment process with polypharmacy application (Anderson et al., 2019).
The purpose of the third research is to evaluate the prevalence of potentially inappropriate prescriptions (PIP) in people aged 65 to 74 years with multimorbidity and polypharmacy, according to different criteria (Lopez-Rodriguez et al., 2020). The fourth article aims to identify whether nurse practitioners’ utilization of medication management protocol would reduce polypharmacy and administration times for long-term care patients (Bergman-Evans, 2020).
Mohamed et al. (2020) used a quantitative research method to assess studies gathered in different databases related to polypharmacy. After collecting research articles, analysts used meta-analysis to examine outcomes associated with PP and/or PIM. The second study combined the systematic reviews of articles that used quantitative and qualitative research methods to provide a meta-analytic investigation of different papers (Anderson et al., 2019). Lopez-Rodriguez et al. (2020) utilized an observational, descriptive, multicentric, cross-sectional study to create five multivariate logistic regression models to evaluate PIP prevalence. The final survey of Bergman-Evans (2020) gathered primary data in hospitals to conduct a descriptive quantitative study as a research method using cases with specific inclusion criteria.
The first article facilitated meta-analysis research that provides reliable and valid data because it gives greater confidence in the conclusions based on numerous studies gathered in one study (Mohamed et al., 2020). Moreover, the authors of the first study asked independent authors to review the quality of analysis and used PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) guidelines. The second investigation uses the same meta-analytic approach as the previous article. Thus, it can be concluded that the outcomes of the study are reliable and valid because analysts also used the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) methodology to strengthen the research results (Anderson et al., 2019).
The third article facilitated a descriptive, cross-sectional study with valid and reliable results, which main strength is the efficiency of time since there is no need for an outcome to happen since it evaluates the prevalence of a specific issue (Lopez-Rodriguez et al., 2020). A descriptive quantitative study used in the final article provided reliable and valid results because it is used the SPSS system to review the data and the main strength of the methodology was the collection of cases, which shared similar characteristics and provided a generalization of information (Bergman-Evans, 2020).
References
Anderson, L. J., Schnipper, J. L., Nuckols, T. K., Shane, R., Sarkisian, C., Le, M. M., Pevnick, J. M., & Members of the PHARM-DC group. (2019). A systematic overview of systematic reviews evaluating interventions addressing polypharmacy. American Journal of Health-system Pharmacy, 76(21), 1777–1787. Web.
Bergman-Evans, B. (2020). A nurse practitioner led protocol to address polypharmacy in long-term care. Geriatric nursing (New York, N.Y.), 41(6), 956–961. Web.
Gurwitz, J. H., Kapoor, A., Rochon, P. (2018). Polypharmacy, the good prescribing continuum, and the ethics of deprescribing. Public Policy & Aging Report, 28(4), 108–112. Web.
Lopez-Rodriguez, J. A., Rogero-Blanco, E., Aza-Pascual-Salcedo, M., Lopez-Verde, F., Pico-Soler, V., Leiva-Fernandez, F., Prados-Torres, J. D., Prados-Torres, A., Cura-González, I., & MULTIPAP group. (2020). Potentially inappropriate prescriptions according to explicit and implicit criteria in patients with multimorbidity and polypharmacy. MULTIPAP: A cross-sectional study. PloS one, 15(8), e0237186. Web.
Mohamed, M. R., Ramsdale, E., Loh, K. P., Arastu, A., Xu, H., Obrecht, S., Castillo, D., Sharma, M., Holmes, H. M., Nightingale, G., Juba, K. M., & Mohile, S. G. (2020). Associations of polypharmacy and inappropriate medications with adverse outcomes in older adults with cancer: A systematic review and meta-analysis. The oncologist, 25(1), e94–e108. Web.