The percentage of the population with more than one long-term condition increases with every decade of life.
But this is not simply because of the effects of the normal ageing process. It is also because people have been exposed for longer to factors in their social and physical environments that cause disease. These environmental factors—air pollution and the need to be inactive at work, for example—are much more important than the genes inherited from parents and grandparents for most common conditions like heart disease, stroke, and dementia.
As the number of diseases increases, so too does the number of drugs prescribed. There is growing concern about the percentage of prescriptions that do no good and, of course, some may do harm because all drugs can have side effects. There is therefore increasing interest in deprescribing: stopping the prescription of a drug, not for financial reasons, but to improve the health of the person for whom the drug was prescribed some years previously.
This editorial is based on an article describing a project in which people had their statins stopped at the age of 75. The bottom line is that stopping statins made no difference to how they felt, even though statins can have side effects.
However, the shrewd comment in the editorial is worth highlighting:
“Age alone should not be used to decide whether preventive therapies should be continued or discontinued.”
Using age alone in this way could be regarded as an example of medical ageism. Every individual taking multiple drugs should regularly review the probability and magnitude of the benefit they hope to be receiving, and the probability and magnitude of the harmful side effects they hope to avoid. But simply picking an age such as 75 and doing the same thing to everyone is not the way to optimise the benefits and minimise the harms of a drug.
Reference
Arya Nezhad S, Rastgou P, Nanna MG. Statin discontinuation in older adults: changing the conversation, not the default. Lancet Healthy Longev. 2026;7(7):100888. doi: 10.1016/j.lanhl.2026.100888.