Efforts to reduce emergency department visits associated with adverse drug events should focus on psychiatric medications, which are top offenders when it comes to root causes of ED visits, according to new research from JAMA Psychiatry.
Researchers from the Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in collaboration with the CDC analyzed national adverse drug event data from psychiatric medications in adult ED patients from 2009 to 2011.
Results showed nearly 20 percent of the 89,094 psychiatric ADE ED visits, or approximately 17,000, result in hospitalizations each year. About 50 percent of those hospitalizations involve patients between the ages of 19 years and 44 years.
Of the visits each year, the following medications were the cause:
Sedatives and anxiolytics: 30,707 visits (34.5 percent), or 3.6 ADE ED visits per 10,000 outpatient prescription visits
Antidepressants: 25,377 (28.5 percent), or 2.4 ADE ED visits per 10,000 outpatient prescription visits
Antipsychotics: 21,578 (24.2 percent), or 11.7 ADE ED visits per 10,000 outpatient prescription visits
Lithium salts: 3,620 (4.1 percent), or 16.4 ADE ED visits per 10,000 outpatient prescription visits
Stimulants: 2,779 (3.1 percent), or 2.9 ADE ED visits per 10,000 outpatient prescription visits
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