Medication Overdoses: A Leading Cause of Accidental Childhood Poisonings

Overdoses of medication are to blame in two out of every three childhood poisonings and responsible of sending nearly 200 two-year-olds to the emergency room in the United States each year, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

When young children find their parents’ prescription pill bottles or other medications laying around the house and eat or drink the drugs, the results can be devastating. Toddlers who consume medications meant for adults are likely to suffer severe, permanent, and possibly even deadly health complications.

Despite longstanding efforts by the drug industry to create childproof caps on drug packaging and other safety measures, which have helped stem the incidence of unintentional medication poisonings, hundreds of children are still injured this way every year, the CDC said.

Rate of Emergency Calls Rising

The percentage of calls to poison-control centers nationwide attributed to incidents involving medication overdoses increased from 34 percent to 44 percent between 2002 and 2006, the CDC said. Increasingly, medications rather than household cleaners, pesticides, and other sources of accidental poisonings are consumed.

Dramatic rises in the numbers of Americans who are prescribed drugs could be a reason for the increase, officials said. The thinking is, there simply are more drugs out there in peoples’ homes that can be found by children and used in accidental overdoses.

ER Visits Linked to Childhood Prescription Overdoses

CDC researchers also studied data on emergency room visits for accidental poisonings in patients 18 and younger across the U.S. in 2004 and 2005. They found that medications represented nearly 69 percent of all such visits, for a total of about 71,000. Over-the-counter products were involved in about 33 percent of the drug-related poisonings, the CDC said.

Acetaminophen, the drug found in Tylenol and other popular pain drugs, were involved in about nine percent of the cases, while cough and cold medications were associated with about seven percent. Antidepressants were used in just over six percent of the cases and ibuprofen (found in Advil) was behind more than five percent of the emergency room visits, the CDC said.

In four out of five visits, the children were found to have ingested the medications on their own. In about 14 percent of cases, it was determined that the child had been given too large of a dose of the medication or otherwise improperly dosed by an adult, the study found.

Younger children were most at risk of accidental medication poisonings, with children under five representing over 81 percent of such incidents, the CDC said. The risk then declined as younger children became older, but then rose again as they reached adolescence, possibly due to parents being more comfortable allowing their older children to take medications on their own.

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