Attitudes towards deprescribing among multi-ethnic community-dwelling older patients and caregivers in Malaysia: a cross-sectional questionnaire study. A Comment

Understanding older adult and caregiver attitudes towards deprescribing will contribute to medication optimization in clinical practice. The objectives of this study were to explore quantitatively the attitudes and beliefs of older adults and caregivers towards deprescribing and identify participant characteristics that were associated with willingness to have a medication deprescribed. This study was conducted in a government-led primary care health clinic and three private community pharmacies in Malaysia with older adults and caregivers of older adults. The revised patients’ attitudes towards deprescribing (rPATD) questionnaire was administered. The rPATD questionnaire had four factors in both older adults’ and caregivers’ versions of the questionnaire (with four to five questions retained in each factor) alongside two global questions that were not included in any of the scoring factors. Our revised statement of main findings now states that most of older adult (n = 340, 67.7%) and caregiver (n = 34, 65.4%) participants agreed or strongly agreed that they would be willing to stop one or more of their or their care recipient’s medications if their or their care recipient’s doctor said it was possible to do so.