Adverse Reactions after Admission

We found a good article at www.worstpills.org about adverse reactions to drugs. Surprisingly, the article says that about 770,000 people experience adverse drug reactions AFTER they’ve been admitted to a hospital!

Following is an excerpt of the article:

In addition to the 1.5 million people a year who are admitted to the hospital because of adverse drug reactions, an additional three-quarters of a million people a year develop an adverse reaction after they are hospitalized. According to national projections based on a study involving adverse drug reactions developing in patients in the hospital, 770,000 additional patients a year–more than 2,000 patients a day–suffer an adverse event caused by drugs once they are admitted. Many of the reactions in the patients studied were serious, even life-threatening, and included cardiac arrhythmias, kidney failure, bleeding, and dangerously low blood pressure. People with these adverse reactions had an almost twofold higher risk of death compared to other otherwise comparable hospitalized patients who did not have a drug reaction. Most important, according to the researchers, almost 50% of these adverse reactions were preventable. Among the kinds of preventable problems were adverse interactions between drugs that should not have been prescribed together (hundreds of these are listed in the Drug-Induced Diseases section of this web site), known allergies to drugs that had not been asked about before the patients got a prescription, and excessively high doses of drugs prescribed without considering the patient’s weight and kidney function.

See the full text of this article here