Opioids given too easily to children: study

By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, July 16, 2018 (HealthDay News) – Many children are prescribed to According to a new study, more than one in ten children enrolled in the Tennessee Medicaid program received an opioid prescription each year between 1999 and 2014, even though they did not have it. have not done. "Opioids are commonly prescribed," said Dr. Cecilia Chung, Senior Researcher, Assistant Professor at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. "In a given year, 15% of children received an opioid prescription."

These prescriptions sometimes led to sickness or death. One in 2,611 opioid prescriptions landed the child in the hospital, and in three cases, the child died, the study authors reported.

For the study, Chung and his colleagues reviewed the medical records of Tennessee children aged 2 to Medicaid between 1999 and 2014.

More than 1.3 million prescriptions opioids were distributed to these children during this period, the results showed. Half were for adolescents aged 12 to 17, about 30% for children aged 6 to 11, and 20% for children aged 2 to 5.

Dental procedures accounted for three out of ten opioid prescriptions, according to the report.

"A lot of the opioids come from dentists," said Dr. Elliot Krane, professor of anesthesiology and pain management specialist at Stanford University.

"A dentist will remove a child's wisdom teeth so give them a week of Vicodin," Krane said. "Opioids are not even the best cure for oral pain and after wisdom tooth extraction, you need analgesics for two or three days, but not necessarily for a whole week."

investigators, 18% of cases and pains due to minor infections in 16.5% of cases.

More than two-thirds of emergency department visits and hospitalizations related to the use of opioids were caused by the therapeutic use of prescriptions.

Krane said that he feared that this study, and America's overall reaction to the epidemic of opioids, will result in opioids not being used to treat the pain appropriately.

Given the number of children who landed in the emergency department, this is "not a huge risk to the public health of children," said Krane, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study.

But these unnecessary unnecessary prescriptions opens up the possibility of diversion – another Krane added, "The problem is knowing what happens to these remaining opioids," Krane said. "Your teenager may be perfectly reliable, but his friends come, they go to the bathroom, they go to the pharmacy, they see oxycodone and the pills are in their pocket."

He suggested, "We need to know how much something is going to hurt, and limit the prescriptions to a reasonable amount," he suggested.

Krane says

The findings, which also showed that there has been a decline in opiate prescriptions in outpatient, were published online July 16 in the journal Pediatrics .

More information

The American Academy of Pediatrics has more about opioid abuse.

SOURCES: Cecilia Chung, MD, Assistant Professor, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee; Elliot Krane, MD, professor, anesthesiologist and pain management specialist, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California; July 16, 2018, Pediatrics Online