Articles related to POISONING/OVERDOSE

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine issued a health advisory on September 25, 2022, encouraging parents to seek medical advice before giving melatonin to children. Although melatonin can be useful in treating certain sleep-wake disorders like jet lag, there is much less evidence it can help healthy children or adults fall asleep faster. Symptoms of melatonin overdose can include headache, dizziness, and irritability.

In 2021, melatonin was the most frequently reported substance involved in pediatric substance ingestions, resulting in 4,000 hospitalizations, 287 ICU admissions, and 2 deaths in children under the age of 2. Melatonin supplements can have 500% more melatonin than indicated on the label and about 30% of OTC products tested had serotonin as well.

In 2019, the FDA warned that gabapentin might cause serious breathing difficulties when used with drugs that depress the central nervous system. The warning may have not been heeded, as overdose deaths in which gabapentin was detected doubled from 449 in the first quarter of 2019 to 959 in the second quarter of 2020.

Burkholderia pseudomallei bacteria showed up in four patients in Georgia, Kansas, Minnesota, and Texas in 2021, despite the bacterium typically associated with travel to tropical and subtropical areas like Thailand and Malaysia. The case was cracked when researchers found an essential oil spray that contained B. pseudomallei in the home of a 4-year-old boy who died from complications of the melioidosis outbreak.

As use of gabapentin in the United States has been steadily increasing in recent years, researchers from the CDC have found that, among the 62,652 overdose deaths that occurred between 2019 and 2020, 58,362 of these cases had documented toxicology results.