Study on drug reactions

Until now, people in the medical profession, and many consumers, knew that there were a lot of drug reactions in the US, but only recently has this theory been studied.

The results come from the first two years, 2005 and 2006, of data from a national surveillance project on outpatient drug safety. The project was developed by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. The study was published in the October 18, 2006 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

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.

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. It is estimated that this doesn’t even give the full count, because researchers believe that some reactions were misdiagnosed or never required a visit to the emergency room. However, from this data, researchers said it translates to 701,547 complications nationwide each year. Researchers estimate that at least 50% of these reactions are in people 65 years old and older.

Complications included diabetics on insulin passing out from low-blood sugar, excessive bleeding in patients on warfarin, a common blood thinner, and severe skin rashes in patients taking amoxicillin. Drug reactions were severe enough to require hospitalization in about 17 percent of patients. The study did not include information on whether any of the reactions were fatal.

The conclusion is that physicians need to spend more time explaining medications to their patients.

My recommendation is that if you take any medication or any supplements, be sure to talk about them with your doctor. Be sure you understand any interactions between multiple drugs and between drugs and herbs. Understand why you are taking anything you take, from a simple vitamin C supplement to a more complicated drug for high blood pressure or diabetes. Know how vitamin C can interact with your medications. Although some of these products may seem very simple, they are still foreign substances that we put into our bodies and we can suffer reactions that could put us in serious medical jeopardy. Don’t become part of the 17,000 people hospitalized due to drug interactions/reactions.

To read the abstract of the survey, click here:

http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/296/15/1858