Issue Date: January 13, 2008

Caution needed on pain relievers

Unintentional deaths from these medications are on the rise.

Poison control centers are flooded with calls related to use of pain medicines.

Despite the presence of warnings and childproof caps on pill bottles, "we are seeing more serious poisonings and deaths," says Eric Lavonas, M.D., an emergency medicine physician at Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, N.C.

More than 280,000 of the 2.4 million people who called poison control centers in 2005 were concerned about possible toxic effects from medications taken to relieve pain, according to the American Association of Poison Control Centers. The centers received more inquiries about such medications than about any other types of substances that year.

Many incidents involving analgesic poisoning of children occur when kids ingest their grandparents' medications. The elderly often remove pills from the hard-to-open childproof containers, making drugs more accessible to children. Newer types of sustained-released analgesics that allow people to take a single pill a day are particularly risky because they contain higher amounts of pain-relieving ingredients. Kids who accidentally swallow such pills may need to be hospitalized.

Among adults, accidentally taking a medicine twice is a common problem, Lavonas says. A much more serious issue, however, is rising use of more potent pain-killing drugs. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, unintentional drug poisoning deaths have increased more than 270% since 1990, when doctors began writing more prescriptions for stronger painkillers such as OxyContin and methadone. Plus, "More people are using painkillers for recreational uses," says Len Paulozzi, a CDC epidemiologist.

Poisonings were the country's second-highest cause of deaths from unintentional injuries in 2004 (after car crashes), killing 20,950 people, according to the CDC. More than 90% of poisoning deaths involved medications, including pain-relieving drugs.

Other leading calls to poison control centers involve concerns about the ingestion of personal care products, mainly by young children; exposure to cleaning substances; and the use of sedatives, hypnotics and antipsychotics.
-- Rochelle Sharpe