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By Kirsten Houmann, Ivanhoe Health Correspondent
ORLANDO, Fla. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Trusting patients to monitor their own prescription drugs is a deadly trend in the United States, a new study reveals.
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Thanks to shortened hospital stays and medications for just about every ailment, an increasing number of people manage their prescription drugs at home; however, this convenience comes at a cost. More and more deaths are occurring as a result of drug complications.
To explore this trend, researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) examined 50 million death certificates stored in the National Center for Health Statistics database. Among those, they looked at 200,000 death certificates where prescription drugs were at fault.
Findings show an astonishing 3,196 percent increase in type 1 errors, or deaths at home from combining medication with alcohol and/or street drugs. On the other hand, researchers found only a five percent increase in type 4 errors. Type 4 errors are prescription drug fatalities that don't take place at home and don't involve alcohol or street drugs.
"Death from medicine alone is going up, but nowhere near as much as deaths from medicine in combination with alcohol and street drugs," lead study author David Phillips, Ph.D., a professor of sociology at UCSD, told Ivanhoe. "The increase that is most steep is when the accident occurs at home."
Dr. Phillips and his team were the first to do a large-scale study of medication fatalities taking place at home. Study results point to a need for more research in this area. "The research implications are to start paying attention to medication errors in the home and paying attention to medication errors caused by patients," Dr. Phillips said. "Another research implication is to start paying attention to patients who are under 60, because our data showed that the increase was particularly steep for them."
Dr. Phillips added that change is also needed on the medical policy level, and "If you are going to include the patient as a member of your quality control team, which is happening more and more, you're going to have to start training them much more carefully than has been done up until now."
Patients themselves can also take precautions against these types of deaths. "It seems as if some patients are ignoring the label instructions which say don't mix alcohol with medicine," Dr. Phillips said. "And, certainly, one thing patients can do is pay attention to the labels."
SOURCE: Ivanhoe interview with David Phillips, Ph.D.; The Archives of Internal Medicine, 2008;168:1561-1566
If this story or any other Ivanhoe story has impacted your life or prompted you or someone you know to seek or change treatments, please let us know by contacting Lindsay Braun at lbraun@ivanhoe.com.
This article was reported by Ivanhoe.com, who offers Medical Alerts by e-mail every day of the week. To subscribe, go to: http://www.ivanhoe.com/newsalert/.
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