Today the health conditions of the elderly population sector pose a complicated scheme, which not only involves illness and death but also disability and limitation of activities of daily life. The increase in life expectancy leads to an increase in the number of chronic diseases, such as hypertension, arthritis, heart disease, cancer, and diabetes mellitus, which require multiple medications for proper treatment (Wang et al, 2016). Aging is a gradual and continuous process of natural change that begins in early adulthood.
During the early middle age, many body functions begin to gradually decrease (Brown, 2016). There is no certain age that makes the individual an elderly person or an elderly person. Traditionally, the age of 65 is considered as the beginning of old age.The own changes that occur with aging also affect the way in which drugs and our organism interact, producing a greater predisposition to suffer anomalous effects. his is a real risk when polypharmacy is present because of interactions between drugs or undesired effects (Charlesworth, Smit, Lee, Alramadhan, & Odden, 2015). The behaviors of the geriatric people before a treatment, are conditioned to their personality, way of life, learning, intelligence, and brain function, and the doctor must perform an evaluation of each elder before the simple prescription of a drug, considering the problems that could arise with its use, which generates, polypharmacy, self-medication, and overdose with deleterious effects for health (Cooper et al, 2015).The medicine is possibly the most used therapeutic resource in the health field, since most of the interventions, both preventive and curative, in this medium include the use of a drug as an intermediary mechanism to obtain a specific health objective.
This implies that the population has been, is or will be exposed to a greater or lesser extent to the beneficial effects, and to the risks, that the use of any medication entails (Davies, & O’mahony,2015).
