Chicago – Harmful reactions to some of the most widely used medicines – including insulin and a common antibiotic – send more than 700,000 Americans to emergency rooms each year, landmark government research shows.
Accidental overdoses and allergic reactions to prescription drugs are the most frequent cause of serious illnesses, according to the study, the first to reveal the nationwide scope of the problem. People over 65 face 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 probably often misdiagnosed.
The study found that a small group of pharmaceutical war horses were most commonly implicated, including insulin for diabetes; warfarin for clotting problems; and amoxicillin, an antibiotic used for all kinds of infections.
People 65 and older faced more than double the risk of requiring emergency-room treatment and were nearly seven times as likely to be admitted to the hospital as younger patients.
The results, from 2004-05, represent the first two years of data from a national 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 today’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 the lead author, Dr. Daniel Budnitz, a CDC researcher.
The study did not include information on fatalities.
The CDC has estimated that about 130 million Americans use prescribed medication every month. Consumers buy far more medicine per person in the U.S. 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 findings highlight the need for better doctor-patient communication about use of medicines, said Jim Conway, senior vice president at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.
