THE USE of common painkillers has been found to significantly reduce agitation in older people with moderate to severe dementia.
The finding comes from a study of 352 residents across 18 nursing homes in Norway and published online yesterday in the British Medical Journal.
One group of participants in the research received individual daily treatment of pain for eight weeks with medicines ranging from paracetamol to morphine while a control group just received their usual treatment and care.
Agitation was reduced by 17 per cent in the group who received painkillers after the trial period.
“Effective management of pain can play an important part in the treatment of agitation and could reduce the number of unnecessary prescriptions for psychotropic drugs in this population,” the authors of the study said.
Prof Des O’Neill, a consultant geriatrician at Dublin’s Tallaght hospital, said this was “a really encouraging and helpful study that will really benefit people”.
He said it added an extra imperative to measure pain and treat it better.
“It’s a fantastic study that shows beautifully that all behaviour has a reason and most agitation may be due to the fact that people are in discomfort,” he said.
“The sort of thing this should lead to is more standardised and systematic measurement of pain by making it the fifth vital sign,” he added.
The vital signs healthcare staff usually first check are a patient’s pulse, then temperature, blood pressure and respiration rate. “They should also now ask ‘how is your pain’ and use standardised pain scales to measure it,” he said.
A report to the European Parliament this year said a new case of dementia is diagnosed in Europe every 24 seconds. The number of people affected across Europe is now estimated at 9.9 million.