(Undark) – The rate of antipsychotic drug use in nursing homes has remained stubbornly high. Experts are concerned about misuse.

A new analysis of more than 12,000 nursing homes by the Long Term Care Community Coalition, or LTCCC, a New York City-based nonprofit that advocates for elderly and disabled people in residential settings, found that more than one in five nursing home residents was being given an antipsychotic medication.

Antipsychotics have sedating effects and are justified only as treatments of last resort when behaviors such as agitation, aggression, or wandering become self-threatening to people with dementia or others around them, said Bruce Miller, a neurologist who directs the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, San Francisco. But the LTCCC also found that hundreds of nursing homes around the country have drugging rates between 50 and 100 percent, raising what Richard Mollot, the organization’s executive director, described as “significant concerns about resident abuse and neglect.” (Read More)