Advertisement	October 1, 2014 More Children End Up Hospitalized After Ingestion of Buprenorphine Atlanta—Unsupervised ingestion of buprenorphine products sent far more children to the hospital than all other commonly implicated medications, according to a new report. In fact, the emergency hospital rate for buprenorphine products was 97-fold higher than the rate for oxycodone products—200.1 versus 2.1 hospitalizations per 100,000 unique patients, according to the report, led by researchers from the CDC and published recently in the journal Pediatrics. Background information in the study, which also included researchers from the FDA and the pharmaceutical company Astra-Zeneca, notes that “emergency department visits and subsequent hospitalizations of young children after unsupervised ingestions of prescription medications are increasing despite widespread use of child-resistant packaging and caregiver education efforts.” The authors suggest that data on the medications implicated in ingestions have been limited but that their findings could be valuable in developing prevention priorities and intervention strategies. For the study, researchers used nationally representative adverse drug event data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System–Cooperative Adverse Drug Event Surveillance project as well as national retail pharmacy prescription data from IMS Health. Information from those databases was used to estimate the frequency and rates of emergency hospitalizations for unsupervised prescription medication ingestions by young children from 2007 to 2011. Using 1,513 surveillance cases, study authors estimated 9,490 emergency hospitalizations occurred annually in the United States during that time period for children younger than 6. More than 75% of those involved 1- or 2-year-old children, the study points out. The most commonly implicated medication classes were opioids (17.6%) and benzodiazepines (10.1%), with buprenorphine (7.7%) and clonidine (7.4%) the most likely active ingredients. Overall, the top 12 active ingredients, alone or in combination with others, were implicated in nearly half, 45%, of hospitalizations, according to the results. Taking into account the number of unique patients who received dispensed prescriptions, the hospitalization rate for unsupervised ingestion of buprenorphine products was significantly greater than all other commonly implicated medications, including oxycodone products, study authors point out. “Focusing unsupervised ingestion prevention efforts on medications with the highest hospitalization rates may efficiently achieve large public health impact,” they add. ​ ​ Click here for October 1, 2014 USP Weekly News Update.
	U.S. Pharmacist Social Connect