A study was conducted about opioid poisoning and the results found an increase in the number of young children and teenagers being victims of ingesting these painkiller drugs that were supposedly for the medication of other members of the family.
This was revealed by head of the study, postdoctoral fellow, Julie Gaither, from Yale School of Public Health. She said that with the enormous number of opioids in households, these children gain access to these prescription medicines.
The mortality rate of children with opioid poisoning-related deaths in the last six years, from 1997 to 2012 was high with 176 deaths while the incidence increased to 165%. This information was gathered from the available data recorded until 2012 which means that for the last four years, the trends in terms of awareness and the prescription of opioids are not available.
To conduct the study, more than 13,000 records from hospital discharges and census date covering the six years were examined to extrapolate rates and the study was then published in JAMA Pediatrics. Conversely, in relation to drug abuse and addiction in adults, the rates are still high although findings show a decrease in the trend.
In the study, researchers also posit that the number of teenagers at risk for opioid overdose, deliberately or otherwise are also increasing since this age group are high risks for suicide and depression, with around 10 out of 100,000 teenagers treated for drug-related poisoning in 2012.
It also found evidence that teenagers may also be leaning towards taking heroin since drug regulations have made it difficult to get prescriptions for opiates with heroin-related hospital cases from aged 15 to 19 increasing by 161%.
As for hospitalized toddlers with opioid-poisoning cases, the rates have also increased from 0.86 to 2.62 for every 100,000 children. This was attributed to the fact that most of these kids thought these drugs were candies.
Gaither recommends that medical practitioners should educate patients on proper storage of drugs. Moreover, she and her co-authors mentioned that this suggestion should coincide with addressing the problem of over-prescription of drugs.
The study also came up with findings that doctors prescribing drugs to children, particularly adults, should be more careful about this practice since there have been reports of high school students who deliberately took opioids prescribed to them for no medical reason at all. Also, the American Academy of Pediatrics noted the increase in the number of young patients being prescribed with painkillers in the 1990s and 2000s.
However, Stanford Medicine physician, Jonathan Chen, thinks otherwise. According to him, asking doctors to teach patients about drug storage in the home might not be possible since these doctors already have a lot of issues to discuss with their patients and should not be expected to always be able to consider the possibility of drugs lying around the house and be taken by other family members. Chen said that while the idea is theoretically good, this might not be possible to be carried out.
For Dr. Julie Gaither, however, it is still crucial for doctors to take children into consideration and the toll opioid-poisoning related to prescription drugs has on their health.