Infants often given cardiac drugs in wrong doses

Infants treated with cardiac drugs get the wrong dose or end up on the wrong end of medication errors more often than older children, according to new research.

While researchers found the highest number of errors among infants under the age of one, they said children of all ages were vulnerable to such mistakes. This is because health-care providers can manually miscalculate weight-sensitive doses and can misinterpret safe age ranges of adult drugs used for children.

“We found that cardiac medication errors happen in children, and they can happen every step of the way but dosing and administration errors were ominously common,” said lead investigator Marlene Miller, Johns Hopkins Childrens' Hospital Centre.

Researchers emphasised that the vast majority of such errors - 96 percent - were benign and caused no detectable harm to patients or never reached the patients, but in four percent of the cases there was harm, although no deaths.

The report and the warnings were drawn from a study analyzing 821 medication errors submitted to a national voluntary error-reporting database.

Half of the errors occurred in children younger than one year, and 90 percent involved children under the age of six months.

Newborns and infants with congenital heart disease - which occurs in four out of 1,000 US babies - are at high risk for such errors since heart medications are most commonly prescribed for them, researchers said.

The other half of dosing errors occurred in patients between the ages of one and six years.

The investigators say certain medication errors in children can be reduced or prevented by computerizing drug orders with built-in double-and triple-checking mechanisms that reduce the likelihood for miscalculation or misinterpretation.

These findings were published in Paediatrics.

Last updated on Jul 8^th, 2009 at 13:49 pm IST--IANS