Medication overdoses send one in every 180 US 2-year-olds to the emergency department every year, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report. Such overdoses are responsible for more than two-thirds of all childhood poisonings.

Most of the time, these cases occur when a child finds a medicine and eats or drinks it without adult supervision, Dr. Daniel S. Budnitz, who directs the Medication Safety Program at the CDC’s Division of Healthcare Quality and Promotion and led the study, told Reuters Health.

“Although there have been some great stride in preventing deaths from overdoses with the traditional child-resistant caps…it might be time to kind of take the next step,” Budnitz said. He said the CDC is working with manufacturers and other agencies to come up with innovative packaging that reduces the likelihood that a child can take too much of a medication.

While the number of calls to poison control centers nationwide is declining, Budnitz and his team note in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, the percentage of those calls that involve medicines rather than household products such as cleaners and pesticides jumped from 34% to 44% from 2002 to 2006.

It’s not clear why, Budnitz said in an interview, but the fact that people are simply taking more medicines these days could be a factor.

To better understand how to prevent unintentional medication overdoses in children, the researchers looked at data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System for 2004-2005 on visits to emergency departments for unintentional poisoning by patients 18 and under.

Medication accounted for 68.9% of these visits, or an estimated 71,224 visits every year, Budnitz and his team found. Over-the-counter products were responsible for a third of the medication-related poisonings.

The most common medications involved were acetaminophen (Tylenol), representing 9.3% of cases; cough and cold medicines, 7.3%; antidepressants, 6.1%; and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs such as ibuprofen (Advil), 5.3%.

Four out of five visits were due to children ingesting medications on their own, while 14.3% involved misuse of medications, for example a child being given too large a dose by an adult, or being dosed too frequently.

The youngest children were most at risk, with kids 5 and under accounting for 81.3% of the medication-related poisonings. As children got older their likelihood of unintentional medication overdose decreased, but rose again during adolescence, possibly because parents were allowing them to take medications on their own, Budnitz and his team note.

“These are not teens who are trying to get high or kill themselves,” Budnitz noted, but who simply may not understand how to use medicines. “Really you can only take medicines as directed. If the bottle says take two for pain it doesn’t mean that taking eight will be even better.”

Parents should know, he added, that teens may still need guidance in using medications properly.

And it’s also crucial for parents to tightly close the caps of medicine bottles and put them up out of the reach of children, he added. Putting medicines in a place that’s “convenient” for parents, he said, may also mean that it’s easy for kids to reach too.

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Antidepressant use among U.S. residents almost doubled between 1996 and 2005, along with a concurrent rise in the use of other psychotropic medications, a new report shows.

The increase seemed to span virtually all demographic groups.

“Over 10 percent of people over the age of 6 were receiving anti-depression medication. That strikes me as significant,” said study author Dr. Mark Olfson, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University/New York State Psychiatric Institute in New York City.

According to background information in the study, antidepressants are now the most widely prescribed class of drugs in the United States. The expansion in use dates back to the 1980s, with the introduction of the antidepressant Prozac (fluoxetine).

The study found that 5.84 percent of U.S. residents aged 6 and over were using antidepressants in 1996, compared with 10.12 percent in 2005. That’s 13.3 million people, up to 27 million people.

“This is a 20-year trend and it’s very powerful,” remarked Dr. Eric Caine, chair of the department of psychiatry and co-director of the Center for the Study of Prevention of Suicide at the University of Rochester Medical Center.

This happened despite a “black box” warning mandated for many antidepressant medications by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2004, the study authors noted.

Lower rates of increases in antidepressant use were seen in blacks (3.61 percent in 1996 versus 4.51 percent in 2005) and in Hispanics (3.72 percent versus 5.21 percent in 2005), the researchers found.

Still, about the same number of people were being treated for depression (26.25 percent in 1996 versus 26.85 percent in 2005), indicating that the drugs were being used to treat other diagnoses, such as anxiety and other mood disorders.

At the same time, those receiving antipsychotic drugs increased from 5.46 percent to 8.86 percent, and the proportion of people using psychotherapy dropped from 31.5 percent to 19.87 percent.

“The reasons [for the growth] are unclear but they may include the introduction of new antidepressants over the last 10 to 12 years or so and a broadening in the clinical indications of antidepressant treatment. Years ago, these drugs were largely focused on depression. Today, more different conditions are treated with antidepressants,” Olfson said. “There’s also been an increase in direct-to-consumer advertising and a lessening of the stigma associated with seeking mental health care.”

Indeed, a study released last week found that roughly five of six Americans now have a positive opinion on psychiatric medications, a marked increase from about a decade ago.

Depression may also be more common in the population, or at least more people may be acknowledging it and seeking help, the authors suggested.

“It is encouraging that there is apparently an increased awareness and increased willingness to seek assistance for emotional distress . . . and that is a big step forward,” said Dr. Kathryn J. Kotrla, chairwoman and associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine.

“I think part of the increased rate is increased awareness, as well as national depression screening all over the country,” added Dr. M. Beatriz Currier, an associate professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. “Education and screening decrease stigma.”

Of concern, however, was the finding that the majority of Americans taking antidepressants were not receiving care from a psychiatrist.

Also troubling was not knowing what the prescriptions were being written for exactly.

“One wonders if the medication is being used as a possible panacea for a number of psychosocial issues which might be better served by counseling,” Kotrla said.

“Who’s really taking these medications?” Caine said. “It’s not clear that it makes anyone healthier. That’s a fundamental issue that we don’t know. We don’t have any way of telling if this made people’s lives better.”

A second study in the same issue of the journal followed 306 preschoolers aged 3 to 6 years for 24 months and found that depression in this group tends not to just go away as the child gets older, but can linger as a chronic condition.

“This is exciting because it gives us an opportunity for early intervention,” Kotrla said.

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