REPORT
Testing times
New drugs aren’t being tested on enough older people – even when they’re the very ones who could be taking that medication one day. It’s wrong – and could be dangerous, say experts. Is it time for more trials, less error?
by RACHEL CARLYLE
You’d think, wouldn’t you, that when your doctor hands you a new prescription, it’s for a drug that’s been tested on people of your age and with conditions like yours? Yet, shockingly, that’s not the case.
As a recent report has revealed, many drugs treating conditions affecting mainly older people – heart failure, diabetes, strokes, falls – have been tested on people decades younger and fitter.
Even worse, this problem was first raised in 1993, yet 30 years later not much has changed. Clinical trials are still excluding older people and ‘we have not seen enough progress’, according to the scathing report called Trial and Error, from the International Longevity Centre in London.
‘There’s a mismatch between the people I see in my clinics who take the drugs and who they are tested on,’ says geriatrician Miles Witham, professor of trials for older people at the NIHR Newcastle Biomedical Research Centre.
‘For example, heart failure [gradual weakening of the heart muscle] gets commoner the older you get, and one in ten people over 80 has it. But most of the clinical trials have enrolled people in their fifties and sixties. So there’s a 20-year gap between those on the trials and the people who actually have heart failure in real life.’
Does this matter? Very much so, say experts. ‘In general you don’t need as big a dose of drugs as you get older, and that means for some we may be giving too much,’ says Prof Witham. ‘It might be right if you’re 50 but not if you’re 80 or 90.’