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There is no 2026 Beers Criteria

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If you have seen something called “The 2026 AGS Beers Criteria,” it is not an American Geriatrics Society publication. There is no 2026 edition.

What is actually current

The current edition is the 2023 update, published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. Before it, 2019. The Society publishes on a multi-year cycle and has not issued a 2026 edition.

What did appear in 2025 is a separate document: an Alternatives List, offering pharmacologic and non-pharmacologic substitutes for medications the criteria flag. It is a companion to the 2023 criteria, not a replacement for them, and citing it as a new edition is an error.

Why it matters more than a citation nitpick

Because these criteria get embedded in policies, order sets and audit tools, and a policy citing a version that does not exist cannot be traced back to anything. On a clinical page or in a facility protocol, the version and year are the load-bearing part of the citation.

The same caution applies to STOPP/START, where criteria counts from superseded versions circulate widely and get attached to the wrong version. Version 3 was published in 2023, and it has a published correction that should be cited alongside it.

And what the Society says about how to use it

Worth repeating whenever the list is quoted: the criteria “should be applied thoughtfully and in a manner that supports, rather than replaces, shared clinical decision-making.” They also explicitly exclude hospice and end-of-life care, an exclusion that is routinely ignored.

Read more: The AGS Beers Criteria · STOPP/START.

References

  1. By the 2023 American Geriatrics Society Beers Criteria Update Expert Panel. American Geriatrics Society 2023 updated AGS Beers Criteria for potentially inappropriate medication use in older adults. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. 2023;71(7):2052–2081. PMID 37139824 · DOI 10.1111/jgs.18372.
  2. By the 2025 AGS Alternative Treatments Panel. Alternative Treatments to Selected Medications in the 2023 American Geriatrics Society Beers Criteria. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. 2025;73(9):2657–2677. PMID 40697073 · DOI 10.1111/jgs.19500.
  3. O’Mahony D, Cherubini A, Guiteras AR, et al. STOPP/START criteria for potentially inappropriate prescribing in older people: version 3. European Geriatric Medicine. 2023;14(4):625–632. PMID 37256475 · DOI 10.1007/s41999-023-00777-y. See also the published correction, Eur Geriatr Med. 2023;14(4):633, PMID 37326916.

Bibliographic records in this note were retrieved from PubMed. Every reference links to its DOI or PubMed record.

Written and medically reviewed by Dr. Gurpreet Singh Padda, MD, MBA, MHP, founder and medical director of DWARAA. Last reviewed . This page is educational. DWARAA does not prescribe, deprescribe, diagnose or treat.

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