CHICAGO — More than half a million U.S. children yearly have bad reactions or side effects from widely used medicines that require medical treatment and sometimes hospitalization, new research shows.
Children younger than age 5 are most commonly affected.
Penicillin and other prescription antibiotics are among drugs causing the most problems, including rashes, stomachaches and diarrhea.
Parents should pay close attention when their children are started on medicines since “first-time medication exposures may reveal an allergic reaction,” said lead author Dr. Florence Bourgeois, a pediatrician with Children’s Hospital in Boston.
Doctors also should tell parents about possible symptoms associated with a new medication, she said.
The study appears in October’s Pediatrics, released today.
It’s based on national statistics on patients’ visits to clinics and emergency rooms between 1995 and 2005. The number of children treated for bad drug reactions each year was mostly stable during that time, averaging 585,922.
Bourgeois said there were no deaths resulting from bad reactions to drugs in the data she studied, but 5 percent of children were sick enough to require hospitalization.
The study involved reactions to prescribed drugs, including accidental overdoses.
