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�The sad loss of 28-year one-time movie worker Heath Ledger in January this year, who died from an
accidental overdose of a prescription do drugs, brought to public attention the potential dangers of patients
managing their possess medications, which when combined with alcoholic beverage and street drugs, has resulted in
a more than 3,000 per cent rear in rest home deaths due to medication errors, aforementioned US researchers in a
new study.

The study is published on-line in the 28th July issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine and was
the work of sociology and biology researchers at the University of California, San Diego.

The motive for the study was that scorn the increasing trend for medications to be consumed outside
of clinical settings without professional supervision, on that point have been few studies on medication errors
outside of clinical settings.

Principal writer David P Phillips, professor of sociology at UC San Diego, and colleagues
said:

"Increasingly, people take their medications at home, out from hospitals and clinics. But nigh
studies of fatal medication errors have focused on those clinical settings. We wanted to know threesome
things: how many of these fatal errors find at home; how many involve alcoholic beverage and/or street drugs;
and are these numbers sledding up?"

For the study, the researchers examined all US death certificates from 1st January 1983 to thirty-first
December 2004 (over 49.5 one thousand thousand), and especially those citing fatal medicinal drug errors (FMEs, nearly
225 thousand).

They classified the deaths into 4 types of FME: domestic or non-domestic, with and without
alcohol/street drugs and examined them with deference to the relative grandness of alcohol or street
drugs and the congener likelihood of professional supervising in the use of the medications.

The four FME types were:

Type 1 = domestic FMEs combined with alcohol and/or street drugs,

Type 2 = domestic FMEs not involving alcohol and/or street drugs,

Type 3 = nondomestic FMEs combined with alcohol and/or street drugs, and

Type 4 = nondomestic FMEs not involving alcohol and/or street drugs.

The results showed that:
Overall FME death rate went up by 360.5 per cent during the 1983 to 2004 period.

This is an order of magnitude higher than the 33.2 per cent for deaths from adverse medication
effects, and 40.9 per centime for deaths from alcohol and/or street drugs.

The increases in FME varied markedly by type, with Type 1 showing the largest, Type 4 the smallest,
and Types 2 and 3 somewhere in between.

FME Type 1 showed the largest increment: 3,196 per cent.

FME Type 4 showed the smallest increase: 5 per cent.

FME Type 2 increased by 564 per cent.

FME Type 3 increased by 555 per cent.

The researchers concluded that "domestic FMEs combined with alcohol and/or street drugs have
go an increasingly important health problem compared with other FMEs", adding that:

"These findings suggest that a shift in the location of medication consumption from clinical to domestic
settings is linked to a steep increase in FMEs."

They suggested deaths due to fatal medication errors could be brought down by direction
interventions not only on clinical only also on domestic settings.

"It also seems advisable to expand research on medication errors. Much of this research has focused
on elderly patients and clinical settings. The present findings suggest that more research should be
devoted to middle-aged patients and domestic settings," they added.

"A Steep Increase in Domestic Fatal Medication Errors With Use of Alcohol and/or Street
Drugs."

David P. Phillips; Gwendolyn E. C. Barker; Megan M. Eguchi

Arch Intern Med. 2008;168(14):1561-1566.

Vol. 168 No. 14, July 28, 2008

Click here for Abstract.

Source: University of California San Diego, journal abstract.

Written by: Catharine Paddock, PhD

Copyright: Medical News Today

Not to be reproduced without license of Medical News Today

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