• Posted January 13, 2026

Seniors With Dementia Being Prescribed Dangerous Mind-Altering Drugs, Study Says

Many seniors with dementia are being put at risk by brain-altering medications linked to falls, confusion and hospitalization, a new study says.

In all, 1 in 4 Medicare-covered seniors with dementia have been prescribed drugs like antipsychotics, barbiturates and benzodiazepines, even though guidelines warn against their use, researchers reported Jan. 12 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“Compared with patients with normal cognition, we found higher levels of prescribing among older adults with cognitive impairment, who face a higher risk of adverse effects from these drugs,” senior researcher Dr. John Mafi said in a news release. He’s an associate professor-in-residence at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

For the study, researchers linked data from a federal health and retirement survey to Medicare claims in order to track prescription patterns between 2013 through 2021.

They specifically looked at five classes of drugs known to act upon the central nervous system in ways potentially detrimental to older dementia patients.

Results showed that about 25% of people with dementia received these drugs.

By comparison, the drugs were prescribed to 17% of seniors with normal cognition and nearly 22% of those with cognitive impairment but no dementia, researchers found.

Over the study period, prescriptions for the drugs fell from 20% to 16% among all Medicare beneficiaries.

“While this decline was encouraging, over two-thirds of patients receiving these prescriptions lacked a documented clinical indication in 2021, the end of the study period, suggesting high levels of potentially inappropriate and harmful prescribing,” Mafi said.

Among all Medicare patients, different trends for specific drug classes were observed:

• Benzodiazepines declined by 11% to 9%.

• Sleep aids fell from 7% to 3%.

• Antipsychotic medication prescriptions rose from 3% to 4%.

• Prescriptions for anticholinergic antidepressants remained steady at under 3%.

• Barbiturate prescriptions fell slightly from 0.4% to 0.3%.

Clinically justified prescriptions declined slightly, from 6% in 2013 to 5.5% in 2021, results showed.

Inappropriate drug prescriptions also fell, from 16% to just over 11%.

The improvement was driven mostly by reductions in prescriptions for benzodiazepines and sleep aids, researchers said.

“It is important for older patients or their caregivers to work closely with their physicians to ensure that these medications are appropriate to their cases," lead researcher Dr. Annie Yang, an internal medicine resident at UCLA, said in a news release.

“When inappropriate, patients and their care teams should consider alternative treatments and consider whether it might be safe to taper or stop the medication,” Yang said.

More information

The Alzheimer’s Association has more on drugs for dementia.

SOURCE: UCLA, news release, Jan. 8, 2026