Impact of Supervised Exercise on One-Year Medication Use in Older Veterans with Multiple Morbidities

Abstract

Exercise is touted as the ideal prescription to treat and prevent many chronic diseases. We examined changes in utilization and cost of medication classes commonly prescribed in the management of chronic conditions following participation in 12-months of supervised exercise within the Veterans Affairs Gerofit program. Gerofit enrolled 480 veterans between 1999 and 2017 with 12-months participation, with 453 having one or more active prescriptions on enrollment. Active prescriptions overall and for five classes of medications were examined. Changes from enrollment to 12 months were calculated, and cost associated with prescriptions filled were used to estimate net cost changes. Active prescriptions were reduced for opioids (77 of 164, 47%), mental health (93 of 221, 42%), cardiac (175 of 391, 45%), diabetes (41 of 166, 25%), and lipid lowering (56 of 253, 22%) agents. Cost estimates resulted in a net savings of $38,400. These findings support the role of supervised exercise as a favorable therapeutic intervention that has impact across chronic conditions.

Keywords: cost; elderly; exercise; polypharmacy; veteran.

Figure 1.

Change in medications from baseline to 12 months of participation in Gerofit. Each row indicates a class of medications with the respective change over 12-months from the entire cohort within each class of medications represented by solid (left), dotted (center), and striped (right). The solid shows percent of veterans that decreased by one or more medications in the respective category, the dotted shows those that remained on the same number of medications, and the striped shows veterans who increased by one or more medications in the respective category. Baseline sample within each category; opioids (n = 164), mental health (n = 221), cardiac (n = 391), diabetes (n = 166), and lipids (n = 253).