The number of children and teens hospitalized for prescription opioid poisonings has more than doubled in recent years, with both accidental overdoses and suicide attempts on the rise, a U.S. study suggests. Annually, the rate of these opioid poisonings among youth up to 19 years old surged from 1.4 per 100,000 children in 1997 to 3.71 per 100,000 kids by 2012, the study found. “I believe that the two-fold increase in hospitalization rates over time for opioid poisonings in children are a direct consequence of the increasing reliance in the U.S. on opioid analgesics to treat acute and chronic pain,” said lead study author Dr. Julie Gaither, a public health researcher at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. For teens aged 15 to 19, the rate of poisonings surged from 3.69 per 100,000 at the start of the study to 10.17 per 100,000 by the end, fueled in part by overdoses involving heroin and methadone, researchers report in JAMA Pediatrics. “Trends we see in teens mirror what we’ve seen in adults – an increase in accidental overdoses (poisonings) from either taking an opioid as prescribed or, increasingly, using opioids for purposes other than to treat pain, including to get high or to enhance the effects of alcohol or other drugs,” Gaither noted by email.

With children 4 years old and under, the rate of poisonings climbed from 0.86 per 100,000 kids to 2.62 per 100,000 by the end of the study period. “The vast majority of opioid poisonings in young children – toddlers and preschoolers – are the result of unsupervised ingestions of medications prescribed for an adult (parent, grandparent) in the household,” Gaither added. To assess trends in poisonings over time, researchers examined data from 13,052 pediatric hospitalizations due to ingestion of prescription opioids. For teens, they also identified poisonings due to heroin. Overall, 176 children, or 1.3 percent, died during hospitalizations for opioid poisoning during the study period. Among teens in the study, poisonings from heroin increased by 161 percent from 0.96 to 2.51 per 100,000 children, while poisonings involving methadone increased by 950 percent from 0.10 to 1.05 per 100,000 children. When the authors examined intent behind the opioid poisonings, there were 16 poisonings attributed to suicide or self-inflected injury among children younger than 10 from 1997 to 2012.