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The number and proportion of emergency admissions of elderly patients with multiple morbidities and correspondingly extensive medication plans has been increasing continuously in recent years (1, 2). Adverse drug events (ADEs) are common reasons for treatment, but are often not recognized as such (1, 3– 6). Adverse drug events are caused by either conventional adverse drug reactions (ADRs) (7) or medication errors (MEs) (6) that lead to clinical symptoms. Overall, greater attention to drug therapy safety seems to be necessary in elderly patients. To identify and prevent risks more easily, lists of potentially inappropriate medications (PIMs) for elderly patients have been developed on the basis of expert consensus. Well-known examples are the Beers list (8), the STOPP and START criteria (9), and, since 2010 in Germany, the PRISCUS list (10, 11). It is assumed that these potentially inappropriate medications are associated with an increased risk of ADEs in elderly patients. Current studies, however, indicate that PIMs are responsible for only a relatively small percentage of ADEs in elderly patients (1, 12, 13). Moreover, in the international literature on PIMs a substantial percentage of drugs and cases were excluded from analyses, and no distinction was made between MEs and ADRs (1, 14). This raises the question of the extent to which errors caused by methodological shortcomings when data on ADEs were collated led to database bias, causing the potential number of PIMs to be underestimated. There are currently no studies available on the occurrence of such events in acute clinical care for drugs on the PRISCUS list. This study therefore aimed to investigate the effects of PIMs on elderly patients admitted as emergency cases regarding ADEs, involving and not involving MEs.