Dangers of dietary supplements

Every year about 23,000 US emergency department visits involve adverse events related to dietary supplements, according to a special article published online October. 14 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Led by researchers at the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the study adds to the growing criticism of the industry which receives lower scrutiny than many other food or medical products.

Greenberg said, “Show your doctor what you want to take and discuss it with them because it’s very hard for a lay person to understand what the ingredients are within a supplement”.

The FDA’s hands-off approach extends to the packaging of dietary supplements.

Chief author Dr. Andrew Geller of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia told Reuters Health the findings suggest that “all medicines and dietary supplements should be stored up and out of sight of children”. After excluding unsupervised ingestion of dietary supplements by children, 65.9 and 31.8 percent of visits for single-supplement-related adverse events involved herbal or complementary nutritional products and micronutrients, respectively. Pills or pill fragments can get lodged in the windpipe or esophagus and can lead to complications.

The new study found that cardiovascular problems were even more commonly associated with weight-loss and energy supplements than prescription stimulants such as amphetamine and Adderall, which must carry warnings about their potential to cause cardiac side effects. “If you want echinacea, buy echinacea”, he said, referring to the herb that many people believe fights colds. Kaplan said he once treated a young man who overdosed on bodybuilding supplements and wound up in kidney failure.

However, industry representatives said their products are used by about half of Americans with the data showing only a relatively small number of injuries.

Over the 10-year period, there were about 3,700 ER visits at these hospitals, including 400 cases in which the person was admitted to the hospital, the researchers found. From these numbers, they calculated the new national yearly estimates.

“The number of emergency department visits attributed to supplement-related adverse events that we identified is probably an underestimation, since supplement use is underreported by patients, and physicians may not identify adverse events associated with supplements as often as they do those associated with pharmaceuticals”, the researchers said.

“I would play basketball and start running every day”, he said.

“We don’t have information about what’s contained in these products”, Geller says.

But the reason for this is not necessarily because people are using the supplements incorrectly or because the supplements are unsafe.

Dietary supplements marketed for weight loss and energy, however, do not have to carry such a label.

The new study is the first to document extent of injuries due to such dietary supplements. Supplements are not supposed to contain active drug products and are nearly always marketed as being made from “natural”, herbal or otherwise benign ingredients.

But that system, Cohen said, relies on doctors and consumers to submit reports of harm from supplements.

The key difference between drugs and supplements, Fabricant said, is that supplements are regulated like a category of food, rather than medication.

Ask your doctor before taking any supplements. Weight-loss supplements and energy boosters have been implicated in serious problems, including one outbreak in 2013 that sickened 97 people and caused at least one death and three liver transplants.

This means educating parents and other caregivers to store dietary supplements and medications out-of-sight and away from young children, Geller said. “If it costs these companies a little more money to do that, that’s OK”.