… emergency department visits, Budnitz explained. Also, “having chronic illnesses can make adverse events more serious when they do occur,” he said.
Michael Cohen, president of the nonprofit Institute for Safe Medication Practices, said it’s important to document trends in adverse drug events.
3. Opioids
“They’ve been focusing on opioids, anticoagulants and antidiabetic drugs like insulin or the oral drugs that people take because these are the ones that are most likely to harm people,” Cohen said.
Budnitz, along with study lead author Nadine Shehab of the CDC and colleagues, examined data involving more than 42,000 emergency department visits in 2013 and 2014.
These cases involved prescription or over-the-counter medicines, dietary supplements, homeopathic products or vaccines identified as the reason for the visit.
Adverse drug events included allergic reactions to medicines, taking too much medication, or a child’s accidental ingestion of a medicine.
Twenty-seven percent of trips to the ER for drug-related reactions and other health problems were serious enough to require hospitalization, the researchers found.
Roughly one-third of visits to the emergency department for adverse drug events occurred among adults 65 and older in 2013-2014, versus one-quarter in 2005-2006. Older adults also had the highest hospitalization rates.
Among kids, antibiotics accounted for 56 percent of emergency visits for adverse drug events among children 5 years and under.
For kids ages 6 to 19, antibiotics were the most common drugs followed by antipsychotic drugs (4.5 percent), often prescribed for children with disruptive behaviors, the researchers reported.
Overall, an estimated 1.3 million emergency department visits for adverse drug events occurred each year of the two-year study period, Budnitz said. That’s up from about 700,000 visits per year in 2005 and 2006, he said.
But “it’s hard to say that the rate changed or didn’t change” because the research team wasn’t able to study how much more these medicines are being used, he explained.
Budnitz said new Medicare payment incentives may help reduce future adverse events by encouraging doctors to perform specific requirements, such as having patients on blood thinners participate in anticoagulation management programs.
Results of the government-funded study were published Nov. 22 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Dr. Chad Kessler, of the Durham Veterans Affairs Medical Center in North Carolina, said collaboration is key to reducing these adverse events.
“When administrators, physicians and other health care personnel as well as the public recognize how large a problem this is, only then can we take the needed steps to remedy this,” said Kessler, co-author of an editorial accompanying the study.