Study finds that liquid drugs are the most commonly misused at home
WebMD News from HealthDay
By Tara Haelle
HealthDay Reporter
MONDAY, Oct. 20, 2014 (HealthDay News) -- A child receives the wrong medication or the wrong dosage every eight minutes in the United States, according to a recent study.
Nearly 700,000 children under 6 years old experienced an out-of-hospital medication error between 2002 and 2012. Out of those episodes, one out of four children was under a year old. As the age of children decreased, the likelihood of an error increased, the study found.
Though 94 percent of the mistakes didn't require medical treatment, the errors led to 25 deaths and about 1,900 critical care admissions, according to the study.
"Even the most conscientious parents make errors," said lead author Dr. Huiyun Xiang, director of the Center for Pediatric Trauma Research at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.
That conscientiousness may even lead to one of the most common errors: Just over a quarter of these mistakes involved a child receiving the prescribed dosage twice.
"One caregiver may give a child a dose, and then a second caregiver, who does not know that and wants to make sure the child gets the proper amount of medicine, may give the child a dose, too," Xiang said. Other reasons for errors included incorrectly measuring the dosage or overprescription of some medications, he said.
Xiang and his colleagues analyzed all the medication errors reported to the National Poison Data System for all children under 6 years old during the study period. Their findings were released online on Oct. 20 in the journal Pediatrics.
Another common feature was that eight of every 10 errors involved liquid medication. There are several possible reasons for that, Xiang said.
"Young children are more likely to be given liquid medicine than medicine in other forms, like tablets or capsules," he said, especially since many prescription and over-the-counter children's medications are in liquid form.
"A second reason is that liquids can be difficult to measure correctly," Xiang said. "Some liquid medications are measured in milliliters, other in teaspoons, some with measuring cups, some with syringes. That can be confusing to parents and caregivers."
A different study -- from the August issue of Pediatrics -- found that using teaspoons or tablespoons to administer children's medications was behind many drug dosing errors. Instructions requiring teaspoons or tablespoons made it twice as likely that parents or another caregiver would incorrectly follow the doctor's prescription than if the instructions were in milliliters, that study found. An error was even more likely if parents used a kitchen spoon to measure out the dose, according to the earlier study.
In the current study, Xiang's team also found that errors involving cough and cold medicines suddenly dropped by two-thirds from 2005 to 2012, a dive likely linked to two events, Xiang said.
source : Medication Errors Occur Every 8 Minutes in U.S. Children
