Beers Criteria

The Beers Criteria (or Beers List) provide a list of medications that are generally considered inappropriate when given to elderly people because these medications may pose more risk than benefit. For a wide variety of individual reasons, the medications listed tend to cause side effects in the elderly due to the physiologic changes of aging. The criteria were created through consensus of a panel of experts by using the Delphi method; they were originally published in the Archives of Internal Medicine in 1991 and were most recently updated in 2003.

References

• Updating the Beers Criteria for Potentially Inappropriate Medication Use in Older Adults Fick DM, Cooper JW, Wade WE, Waller JL, Maclean, JR, Beers, MH. Arch Intern Med. 2003;163:2716-2724.
• Potentially Inappropriate Medications for the Elderly According to the Revised Beers Criteria