Study, Jan/18: "Interventions to improve benzodiazepine tapering success..."

The full title of this Canadian study is "Interventions to improve benzodiazepine tapering success in the elderly: a systematic review".

 

"CONCLUSIONS:  Patient education is a successful, time- and cost-effective intervention that can significantly help with benzodiazepine discontinuation success. CBT may also be an effective approach. However, cost can be an issue since public healthcare coverage in Canada does not cover psychotherapy. More research is needed in looking at pharmaceutical adjuvants and their role in assisting with benzodiazepine discontinuation."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29336611 

 

Great to see a study on this topic!

It's too bad they don't read this before thinking of tapering someone: http://www.benzoinfo.com/2018/02/06/why-currently-available-benzodiazepine-dosages-prevent-safe-withdrawal/

The only thing that made withdrawaal with sucess was using Clonazepam in drops form. Pill-Splitting made me very sick and i suspect it's useless.

This study isn't talking about the specifics of pill dosages, though. They're looking at what helps to improve tapering success. We don't have details on individual tapering plans or anything -- whether it be liquid vs. microtaper vs. anything else. I can't access the full study, so really, it's just a summary that we're seeing here.

 

Personally, I was happy to see that patient education was what stood out as a beneficial intervention, rather than other medications. CBT -- another non-pharmaceutical intervention -- seemed to be "promising". To me, these are positives. I'm not a fan of adding another medication into the mix.