Dietary supplements send thousands to emergency room yearly

A new study in the New England Journal of Medicine took a look at a decade’s worth of USA hospital admission data and found that over 23,0000 visits a year are actually due to substances people are taking to, theoretically, improve their health: vitamins and herbal supplements. Researchers tracked E.R. visits at a large network of hospitals over a ten-year period.

We’re told supplements may have played a role in former National Basketball Association star Lamar Odom’s coma and the feds warn too many millennials are winding up in ERs after overdosing on diet pills and energy boosters.

Industry critics say the study shows the need for stronger regulation of supplements.

Recently obtained numbers suggest that each year, Americans spend nearly $15 billion on the different dietary supplement. The effects stemmed from the use of dietary supplements like minerals or vitamins, amino acids and herbal pills.

In comparison, prescription drugs are responsible for 30 times as many trips to the emergency room each year.

Unsupervised ingestions by children also accounted for more than one fifth (21 percent) of the emergency visits, with nearly two thirds involving micronutrients. Of all the patients in the emergency room every year, 10% needed prolonged hospitalization as well.

“To put this projected number of 23,000 annual emergency room (ER) visits into context, we estimate that far less than one tenth of one percent of dietary supplement users experience an emergency room visit annually”.

Weight-loss or energy products caused more than half the visits in the age group, commonly for cardiac symptoms such as palpitations, chest pain and tachycardia. The most harrowing information of the data was the fact that 20 percent of people being sent to the ER are children who take dietary pills without supervision.

One finding was that emergency room visits caused by supplements occurred predominantly among young people, whereas those for pharmaceutical products occurred in large part among older adults, said Dr Andrew Geller, a medical officer at the division of health care quality promotion at the CDC and the lead author of the study.

When it came to people, swallowing problems caused almost 40% of emergency department visits for supplement-related adverse events.