By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
A new report released today has found that more and more people, particularly middle-aged women in urban areas, are experiencing serious overdoses and even death due to accidental poisoning by prescription drugs.
“People have seen the headlines related to Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson, Anna Nicole Smith and they think that’s tragic but maybe contained to Hollywood,” said Dr. Jeffrey H. Coben of West Virginia University School of Medicine in Morgantown to Reuters Health. “But the fact of the matter is we are seeing, across the country, very significant increases in serious overdoses associated with these prescription drugs.”
According a report released today by Cohen and colleagues, hospital admissions for poisoning by prescription opioids (morphine, methadone, OxyContin, Percocet), sedatives and tranquilizers (Valium, Xanax, Ativan) rose from 43,000 in 1999 to 71,000 by 2006. This 65 percent increase is double the rate of hospitalizations for poisons by other drugs and medicines.
There appears to be no single reason for the sharp increase in poisonings, Cohen said, and cited the increasing availability of the drugs along with the attitude by many that prescription drugs are less dangerous than street drugs such as heroin and cocaine as being partially to blame.
Unintentional poisoning is now the second leading cause of unintentional injury death in the US, the report found. Among people 35 to 54 years old, unintentional poisoning surpassed motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of unintentional injury death in 2005.
Coben’s team also found an increase in intentional poisonings by prescription drugs. Suicide, self-inflicted poisoning, or poisoning someone else with prescription opioids, sedatives, and tranquilizers more than doubled, from about 10,000 in 1999 to nearly 24,000 in 2006.
Methadone poisoning accounted for the largest increase for a specific drug. Researchers believe this could be due to a 10-fold increase in retail sales of the drug from 1997 to 2006.
This is followed by poisoning by benzodiazepines such as Xanax and Ativan — drugs that possess sedative, hypnotic, anti-anxiety, anticonvulsant and muscle relaxant activities — which rose 39 percent over the study period.
Another interesting find was that hospitalizations from prescription drug poisonings often involved women 35 to 54 years old who live in urban settings and most of the cases were unintentional, “although the intent of a large number of cases was undetermined,” Coben and colleagues note in their report.
Cohen recommends a multifaceted approach to the problem.
“Doctors need to perhaps rethink the types and quantities of medications they are prescribing,” he told Reuters Health.
“And we need to get better messages out to the public in terms of the dangers associated with these medications and combinations of these medications that are being used.”
The report has been published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
