Kids taking meds once limited to adults

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More than 25 percent of today's kids and teens are now taking prescription medications. Are doctors overmedicating America's youth?
Prescriptions for antihypertensives in people age 19 and younger have increased some 17% since 2007.

Yaromir/Dreamstime.com

Prescriptions for antihypertensives in people age 19 and younger have increased some 17% since 2007.

It's no secret that pediatricians are freely writing prescriptions for drugs to treat asthma and hyperactivity. A past study published in Pediatrics found that from 2002 to 2005, asthma medication use jumped 46.5 percent and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder medication (ADHD), 40.4 percent--and these numbers are continuing to climb.

More surprising, doctors are recommending pills to kids once only prescribed to adults, "from statins to diabetes pills and sleep drugs," according to the Wall Street Journal

And the most dramatic spike might be in children taking drugs to treat type-2 diabetes, a disease that was once only seen in adults and is now associated with the childhood obesity epidemic.

Why are drugs increasingly prescribed to children? Poor diets and lack of exercise is an obvious reason. Environmental factors are something else to consider.

Also, parents and doctors have become more aware of drugs as an option to treat kids' conditions. What's more, doctors are screening, diagnosing, and treating children earlier than in the past.

While medication is helpful and absolutely necessary in many cases, all of this pill popping has some downsides.

The Journal reports:

Most medications that could be prescribed to children on a chronic basis haven't been tested specifically in kids, says Danny Benjamin, a Duke University pediatrics professor. And older drugs rarely get examined, since pharmaceutical firms have little incentive to test medicines once they are no longer under patent protection.
Still, a growing number of studies have been done under a Food and Drug Administration program that rewards drug companies for testing medications in children. In more than a third of these studies, there have been surprising side effects, or results that suggested a smaller or larger dose was needed than had been expected, Dr. Benjamin says. Those findings underscore that children's reactions to medicines can be very different than those of adults. Long-term effects of drugs in kids are almost never known, since pediatric studies, like those in adults, tend to be relatively short.
"We know we're making errors in dosing and safety," says Dr. Benjamin, who is leading a new National Institutes of Health initiative to study drugs in children. He suggests that parents should do as much research as they can to understand the evidence for the medicine, confirm the diagnosis, and identify side effects. Among the places to check: drug labels and other resources on the FDA's website, published research at www.pubmed.gov, and clinical guidelines from groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Why do you think children are increasingly medicated? Has medication helped your child? Do you think doctors are overmedicating?

Posted By: Amy Graff (Email, Twitter, Facebook) | December 31 2010 at 03:43 PM

Listed Under: Health: kids