Health 24, South Africa, June 07, 2007 KINGSTON, Ontario -- A new study adds to growing evidence that antipsychotic drugs raise death rates among elderly people, who are sometimes given them when their behavioural problems become too much for doctors or families to handle. "For individual patients, the risk is small," said study author Dr Sudeep Gill, an assistant professor at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Still, "patients and their families need to talk to their doctors about the potential risks and benefits, and this study would suggest only using these drugs when other less risky approaches have been exhausted." Why does the increased risk appear to exist? "I suspect this is because older patients are more vulnerable to adverse effects, since they much more often have underlying heart disease and problems swallowing, and the antipsychotic drug effects are the 'last straw' that precipitates a lethal event," Gill said. Dr James S. Goodwin, director of the Sealy Centre on Aging at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, agreed with the researchers about the study's drawbacks. An "observational" study like this one, in which researchers do not control which people take a drug, raises the prospect that the results may be caused by something other than a drug, he said. "So the same underlying reasons that led physicians to put a patient on a treatment might be the reason for the poor or good outcome," he said. "In this case, to give just one example, patients with delirium are much more likely to be given antipsychotics, and patients with delirium are at higher risk of death."