Doctors should try not to prescribe antipsychotic drugs for elderly people with Alzheimer's, geriatricians said following new research that concluded taking people taking the medications had double the risk of dying during the course of the study.

Anti-psychotic medications are sometimes given to control symptoms of dementia in elderly patients, such as wandering and aggressiveness. Generally, the drugs work by subduing the patients, making them easier to manage in facilities such as nursing homes.

In the study appearing in Friday's issue of the medical journal Lancet Neurology, researchers followed 165 patients in Britain aged 67 to 100 with moderate to severe Alzheimer's disease from 2001 to 2004.Half of the participants continued taking their antipsychotic medications, including Risperdal (risperidone), Thorazine (chlorpromazine) and Stelazine (trifluoperazine). The other half got placebos.

During the three-year study, seniors given a placebo were 42 per cent less likely to die than those who stayed on anti-psychotic medications, Clive Ballard of the Wolfson Centre for Age-Related Diseases at King's College London and his colleagues said.

"I definitely think the results here are significant, and they reinforce some previous studies," said Dr. David Conn, vice-president of medical services and academic education at the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care in Toronto. "We definitely need to pay attention to the results."