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ED visits due to cough and cold medicines significantly decreased after voluntary withdrawal

Shehab N. Pediatrics. 2010;doi:10.1542/peds.2010-1839.

The number of visits to the ED for adverse events related to cough and cold medications among children younger than 2 years was reduced by more than half after a voluntary withdrawal of these over-the-counter medications in 2007, according to researchers from the CDC.

The researchers identified ED visits related to cough and cold medication adverse events from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System-Cooperative Adverse Drug Event Surveillance project. This project includes 63 hospitals in the United States. The ED visits included took place within the 14 months before and the 14 months after the withdrawal was announced.

For children aged younger than 2 years, the number of ED visits related to adverse events from cough and cold medicines was 2,790 in the 14 months before the withdrawal. In the 14 months after the withdrawal, the number of ED visits for this reason was 1,248. The number of ED visits for children younger than 12 years remained unchanged.

Approximately two-thirds of the ED visited were related to unsupervised ingestion of cough and cold medicine, both before and after the withdrawal. The remaining one-third was related to supervised ingestion of cough and cold medication, but no medication error was documented. The proportion of allergy symptoms and neurologic or behavioral symptoms was similar before and after the withdrawal. Also, a similar proportion of children were treated by gastric decontamination.

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