{"doi":"10.1111/jgs.18856","title":"The U.S. deprescribing research network: Catalyzing research and action to optimize medication use in older adults","abstract":"Deprescribing is an essential component of safe and effective health care for older adults, with particular relevance to older adults with vulnerabilities such as multimorbidity and dementia that place them at high risk of adverse consequences from unnecessary, harmful, and goal-discordant medication use.1 Yet, deprescribing is much easier said than done. There is a paucity of research about how to safely and effectively stop medications among older adults, and the medical research paradigm is based on testing and implementing new treatments rather than the removal of treatments. Supplementing the existing paradigm with a new way of thinking requires new methods, new collaborations, and a new generation of investigators.2 To address this challenge, in 2019 NIA funded the US Deprescribing Research Network (USDeN), a national research network whose mission is to expand the quality, quantity, and translational impact of research on deprescribing for older adults. To date, USDeN has been remarkably successful. Educational and community-building programs, including highly attended annual meetings, a webinar series, a junior investigator intensive program comprising 13–15 early-career scholars per year, and a monthly newsletter distributed to more than 900 network members have engaged hundreds of interprofessional investigators and stakeholders in collaborative research. These include physicians from a variety of specialties, pharmacists, nurses, PhD scientists, and many others. The network has funded and supported 3–6 pilot research projects per year, plus 4 additional large pilot studies on benzodiazepine deprescribing funded by a special award from the National Center on Complementary and Integrative Health and an additional 4 studies funded under NIA dementia-focused administrative supplements (Figure 1, Table S1). These programs have catalyzed new scholarship and future grant-supported research, particularly in populations with dementia, multimorbidity, and other vulnerabilities, with network-supported investigators publishing many hundreds of papers relevant to deprescribing science and obtaining a wide variety of grants on the topic.3-5 Working groups, a data harmonization initiative, and resource development programs (all hosted at https://deprescribingresearch.org/) have created resources and established evidence-based best practices on foundational topics in deprescribing science. These topics include identifying high-value targets for deprescribing, consensus outcome measures to use in deprescribing studies, guidance on measuring deprescribing using data from electronic health records, and an ongoing project to identify best practices in deprescribing communication.6, 7 Stakeholder engagement activities, including robust input from a stakeholder council, have informed each of these activities and helped ensure that network-supported activities are relevant to the needs of older adults and those who help care for them. Yet, much essential work remains to be done, and the field of deprescribing research faces persistent challenges. Deprescribing is one part of a larger picture; the best use of medications for older adults depends both on our prescribing practices and how de-implementation can move forward. Deprescribing is inherently a part of complex processes and concepts, including behavior change, interoperability of EHRs, and other systems that affect medication use, and a stretched and fragmented healthcare system that undervalues cognitive specialties and interdisciplinary work.8, 9 In addition, the measurement of outcomes of deprescribing interventions at scale that are person-centered, clinically meaningful, and amenable to change is difficult.7, 10 Inherent in these challenges is the opportunity for transformative approaches across the research spectrum to identify and implement impactful deprescribing strategies and assess their impact on person-centered outcomes. As one of the 4Ms of the age-friendly health syst","journal":"Journal of the American Geriatrics Society","year":2024,"id":478504,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":2,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9605,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2024-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":523942,"name":"Michael A. Steinman","orcid":"0000-0002-9564-9480","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":270278,"name":"Cynthia M. Boyd","orcid":"0000-0001-5642-9015","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":10,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:06:46.330532Z","pmid":"38456495","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}