ABSTRACT

Objective  To assess the prevalence and patterns of exposure to drugs and therapeutic agents among hospitalized pediatric patients.

Design  Retrospective cohort study.

Setting  A total of 411 general hospitals and 52 children’s hospitals throughout the United States.

Patients  A total of 587 427 patients younger than 18 years, excluding healthy newborns, hospitalized in 2006, representing one-fifth of all pediatric admissions in the United States.

Main Outcome Measures  Daily and cumulative exposure to drugs and therapeutic agents.

Results  The most common exposures varied by patient age and by hospital type, with acetaminophen, albuterol, various antibiotics, fentanyl, heparin, ibuprofen, morphine, ondansetron, propofol, and ranitidine being among the most prevalent exposures. A considerable fraction of patients were exposed to numerous medications: in children’s hospitals, on the first day of hospitalization, patients younger than 1 year at the 90th percentile of daily exposure to distinct medications received 11 drugs, and patients 1 year or older received 13 drugs; in general hospitals, 8 and 12 drugs, respectively. By hospital day 7, in children’s hospitals, patients younger than 1 year at the 90th percentile of cumulative exposure to distinct distinct medications had received 29 drugs, and patients 1 year or older had received 35; in general hospitals, 22 and 28 drugs, respectively. Patients with less common conditions were more likely to be exposed to more drugs (P = .001).

Conclusion  A large fraction of hospitalized pediatric patients are exposed to substantial polypharmacy, especially patients with rare conditions.

In the United States, for persons young and old, exposure to medications is essentially universal.¹Over the past decade, the relatively neglected area of pediatric drug effectiveness and safety has received increasing attention. The 2002 Best Pharmaceuticals for Children Act (BPCA),² building on the 1997 US Food and Drug Administration Modernization Act,^3– 4 set forth the goal of reducing pharmaceutical errors in the dispensing of drugs to hospitalized children. In the hospital setting, the efficacy and safety of many pediatric medications have not been well established⁵; much of the use of medications is for off-label indications⁶; and medication errors occur.^5,7– 10 Both the BPCA and the complementary Pediatric Research Equity Act of 2003¹¹ have underscored the need for pediatric studies regarding both on- and off-label drug treatments^12– 14 and for improvements in pediatric drug labeling.^15– 16

To advance this agenda, we need to refine our knowledge of the overall patterns of pediatric inpatient drug and therapeutic agent use, including what drugs and therapeutic agents are used most commonly, the number of different drugs and therapeutic agents that hospitalized children receive, and potential differences in drug and therapeutic agent exposures across different types of hospitals. This knowledge, especially if based on population-level data, would enhance efforts to prioritize and design research studies regarding the effectiveness and safety of pediatric inpatient medications.^17– 19

To address these objectives, we combined hospital medication use data from 2 large databases, the first of which comprises data exclusively from children’s hospitals while the second data set comprises data from mostly general hospitals; together these data sets represent approximately 19.9% of all pediatric inpatient hospitalizations in the United States. In this report, we examine drug and therapeutic agent use patterns among hospitalized pediatric patients (excluding healthy newborns) evident in the combined data, focusing on exposure to polypharmacy, which has been shown to be associated with an increased risk of adverse drug reactions in adult patients in intensive care units and other settings.^20– 21

Source: JAMA