Geriatric Care Management Blog

In my past two blog postings I have talked about some recent warnings from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that concern me as a geriatric care manager, and they should concern caregivers and the elders in their charge as well.  This most recent and third warning was about some of the dosing for drugs that are used for people who may be anemic or suffer from chronic kidney disease or be on chemotherapy of some sort.  As you may suspect, this is a relatively smaller segment of the adult population, and as you will see here, it gets even smaller as we are mainly talking about people with chronic kidney disease.  But one of these medications has been part of one of my client’s standard monthly routine for some time, so it struck closer to home.

You may know these drugs by their brand names if you or a loved one has one of the conditions.  The brand names are Procrit, Epotin or Aranesp, and they help the body increase the red blood cell count for people with some types of anemia.  These drugs, referred to as erythropoiesis-stimulating agents or ESAs, are also now known to increase patients’ risk of cardiovascular events.  As with the other two warnings I have posted, these risks only became known over time as more and more people were given these medications.  This is because the actual cardiovascular events they can cause are still fairly rare.

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