Americans Take Prescription Drugs for Nearly Half Their Lives: Study

People are reportedly spending more time taking prescription drugs than they might spend in their first marriage, getting an education, or working.

Pharmacists working in the Life Pharmacy on March 19, 2020. Niall Carson/PA Media

U.S. citizens spend around half their lives ingesting prescription drugs, with the number of people taking five or more drugs at the same time rising, according to recent research.

The Oct. 1 study, published in the journal Demography, looked at how many years Americans spend on taking prescription drugs. It looked at data from 15,000 households between 1996 and 2019. An analysis estimated that a newborn boy born in 2019 would have a life expectancy of 76.59 years, out of which he would take prescription drugs for 48 percent of his life, or 36.84 years. For newborn girls, life expectancy was calculated to be 81.72 years, out of which nearly 60 percent, or 47.54 years, would be spent taking prescription drugs.

A 25-year-old man in 2019 would spend 59.4 percent of his remaining life taking prescription medication. For 25-year-old women, this figure was at 71.1 percent.

“The years that people can expect to spend taking prescription drugs are now higher than they might spend in their first marriage, getting an education, or being in the labor force,” said Jessica Y. Ho, author of the study who is also an associate of Penn State’s Social Science Research Institute, according to an Oct. 6 post by the university.

“It’s important to recognize the central role that prescription drug use has taken on in our lives,” she said. “As an American, I’d like to know what medications I’m putting in my body and how long I can expect to take them.”

The study noted that prescription drug usage has reached “very high levels,” with over half of all men and women taking them in 2019.

The research also sheds light on the issue of polypharmacy—when an individual takes five or more drugs at the same time. Polypharmacy “is high and increasing among adults and children,” with older adults having “the highest levels of polypharmacy,” the study noted.

Among adults aged 65 and above, 42 percent were taking five or more prescription drugs back in 2012, it pointed out. In the current analysis, the study found that a newborn boy born in 2019 would spend 15 percent of his life taking five or more drugs. For a newborn girl, it was 20 percent.

Among 85-year-old men and women in 2019, more than half were estimated to be taking five or more drugs for the remaining part of their lives.

Contributing factors of polypharmacy include “high burdens of chronic disease and multimorbidity, the intensification of treatment for chronic diseases, a growing propensity to treat earlier disease stages (e.g., prediabetes), fragmentation in the health care system, and increasing use of drugs to counter side effects of other drugs.”

Increases in polypharmacy are “particularly impactful for older adults, who are at the greatest risk of experiencing negative effects” due to factors like metabolic changes associated with aging and a higher prevalence of impaired cognition.

The study noted that polypharmacy raises the risks of falls, cognitive impairment, hospitalization, lower quality of life, and mortality.

“This paper is not trying to say that use of prescription drugs is good or bad,” Ms. Ho said. “Obviously, they have made a difference in treating many conditions, but there are growing concerns about how much is too much.”

“There’s a large body of research that shows Americans are less healthy and live shorter lives than our counterparts in other high-income countries. The prescription drug piece is part and parcel of that reality.”

Gender and Racial Differences

The study found that a majority of women older than 15 take prescription drugs. Among men, this was 40 years. Ms. Ho attributes the trend of women taking prescription drugs at an earlier age in part to birth control and hormonal contraceptives.

Prescription drugs are seen on shelves at a pharmacy in Montreal, on March 11, 2021. The Canadian Press/Ryan Remiorz

“But it is also related to greater use of psychotherapeutic drugs and painkillers among women,” she said. “If we consider the difference between men and women, excluding contraceptives would only account for about a third of the difference.”

“The remaining two-thirds is primarily driven by the use of other hormone-related drugs, painkillers and psychotherapeutic drugs used to treat conditions such as depression, anxiety and ADHD.”

The study found a big racial difference when it came to male-female drug prescription intake age, with Whites starting at an earlier age.

Among males, the majority of White men start taking prescription drugs at the age of 40. This was 45 for Blacks and 55 for Hispanics. Among females, over half of all White women older than 15 were found taking prescription drugs. This was at 40 for Blacks and 45 for Hispanics.

Over-Prescription of Drugs

An over-prescription of drugs can end up causing harm. For instance, amid high antibiotic usage, public health officials have warned that the growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria is speeding up.

Every year, five antibiotic prescriptions are written for every six people in the United States, with a third of them not needed at all.

“Sometimes antibiotics make you feel a little bit better … some of them have a little anti-inflammatory response. But all you’re really doing is training your own bacteria to become resistant to that antibiotic,” Romney Humphries, division director of the laboratory at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, said in an interview with The Epoch Times.

According to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), over 2.8 million antibiotic-resistant infections occur in the country every year, out of which around 35,000 infections lead to death.

A Jan. 2022 report by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) pointed out that nationwide per capita use of prescription drugs rose over the past decade.

“Per enrollee, use of prescription drugs has also increased in Medicare Part D and Medicaid—from an average of 48 prescriptions per year in 2009 to 54 in 2018 in Medicare Part D, and from 7 prescriptions per year to 11 in Medicaid over that period,” it said.

The report attributed the increased use of prescription drugs primarily to “increasing availability and use of generic drugs, along with the continued development of new treatments.”