When people take medicine at home, mistakes happen.
Some people end up taking the wrong dose of a medication or the wrong pill. Sometimes, they don't wait long enough before taking a second dose.
Other times, it's a health professional who's at fault. A pharmacist might have dispensed a medication at the wrong concentration, for example.
These kinds of mistakes are on the rise, according to a study published Monday in the journal Clinical Toxicology.
The researchers looked at a small subset of the medication errors that happen in the U.S. every year. The FDA estimates that about 1.3 million people are injured by medication errors annually in the U.S.
The study analyzed data collected by poison control centers across the U.S. and counted only errors that happened outside health care facilities and resulted in serious medical outcomes. That's defined in the study as symptoms that typically require some treatment to life-threatening situations and even death.
They found that the number of these cases doubled, from 3,065 cases in 2000 to 6,855 cases in 2012. In the 13 years covered by the study, more than 67,000 such errors occurred, and 414 people died as a result. Most of the mistakes were preventable, the study finds.
"We know that a third of the cases in this study resulted in hospital admissions, so these aren't minor errors. These can be pretty significant," says Nichole Hodges, a research scientist at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, and the study's lead author. She says errors at home represent a significant public health burden and are likely undercounted.
"Since we're only including those non-health care facility errors that are reported to poison control centers, it's an underestimate of the true number," she says.
Jay Schauben, a former president of the American Association of Poison Control Centers, points out that not everyone calls a poison control center when they experience one of these events. And he says there could be "minor inaccuracies" in the data from poison control, because the employees who answer calls are relying on what the caller tells them, and if a physician calls about a patient, that physician might not know exactly what happened to the patient.
Despite these limitations, he says the study's findings are still valid and useful. And he says he's glad to see this study draw attention to medication errors happening at home.
"We focus on medication errors in health care facilities, and we tend to forget that these types of errors do occur in the home scenario and potentially go uncorrected, maybe unrecognized," Schauben says.