Healthy Skepticism Library item: 6358

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Publication type: news

Medication reactions send over 700,000 Americans to hospital: Study
The Associated Press 2006 Oct 17

Full text:

Medication reactions send over 700,000 Americans to hospital: study
Last Updated: Tuesday, October 17, 2006 | 4:01 PM ET
The Associated Press

Harmful reactions to some of the most widely used medicines from insulin
to a common antibiotic sent more than 700,000 Americans to emergency rooms
each year, landmark government research shows.
Accidental overdoses and allergic reactions to prescription drugs were the
most frequent cause of serious illnesses, according to the study, the first
to reveal the nationwide scope of the problem. People over 65 faced the
greatest risks.
“This is an important study because it reinforces the really substantial
risks that there are in everyday use of drugs,” said patient safety
specialist Bruce Lambert, a professor at the University of Illinois at
Chicago’s college of pharmacy.
Even so, the study authors and other experts agreed that the 700,000
estimate was conservative because bad drug reactions are likely often
misdiagnosed.
In 2004, a comprehensive Canadian study found preventable medical errors,
including wrong medications or doses, contribute to between 9,000 and 24,000
deaths in Canada a year.
The study found that a small group of pharmaceutical warhorses were most
commonly implicated, including insulin for diabetes, warfarin for clotting
problems, and amoxicillin, a penicillin-like antibiotic used for all kinds
of infections.

“These are old drugs which are known to be extremely effective. We could not
and would not want to live without them. But you’ve got to get the dose
exactly right. Variations, especially on the high side, are really
dangerous,” Lambert said.
He was not involved in the research.
Those aged 65 and older faced more than double the risk of requiring
emergency room treatment and were nearly seven times more likely to be
admitted to the hospital than younger patients.
Troubling numbers
The results, from 2004-05, represent the first two years of data from a
national surveillance project on outpatient drug safety. The project was
developed by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the
Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety
Commission.
The study was published in Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical
Association.
The database included 63 nationally representative hospitals that reported
21,298 bad drug reactions among U.S. adults and children treated in
emergency rooms during the two-year period. The tally is based on what
emergency room doctors said were complications from using prescription
drugs, over-the-counter medicines, dietary supplements or herbal treatments.
The researchers said it translates to 701,547 complications nationwide each
year.
“Experts had thought that severe outpatient drug events were common, but no
one really had good numbers” until now, said lead author Dr. Daniel Budnitz,
a CDC researcher.
Complications included diabetics on insulin passing out from low-blood
sugar, excessive bleeding in patients on warfarin, and severe skin rashes in
patients taking amoxicillin. Drug reactions were severe enough to require
hospitalization in about 17 per cent of patients. The study did not include
information on whether any of the reactions were fatal.
“The numbers are quite troubling,” said Jim Conway, senior vice-president at
the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. The tally underscores that “there
is a tremendous number of consumers in the United States taking medication.”
The CDC has estimated that about 130 million Americans use prescribed
medication every month. U.S. consumers buy far more medicine per person than
anywhere else in the world.
Yet a recent study found that doctors’ conversations with patients when
prescribing new drugs aren’t very thorough and that side-effects often
aren’t mentioned.
Many of the drugs implicated in the new study require frequent physician
monitoring.
© The Canadian Press, 2006