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By Keith Mulvihill
NEW ORLEANS, Mar 12 (Reuters Health) - Older adults make up about one third of deaths among callers to poison hotlines despite the fact that they represent less than one tenth of the call-in population, researchers said here on Saturday at the first joint conference of the American Society on Aging and The National Council on the Aging.
The investigators found that older women were much more likely than men to take the wrong medication, such as antidepressants, for an extended period of time or to inadvertently take more doses than prescribed. Women were also more likely to call in after ingesting or inhaling cleaning products including bleach.
The study was presented by lead author Dr. Kimberly A. Skarupski of Pennsylvania State University in Erie.
"This is the first study to examine poisonings (based on calls to a poison center) in the elderly in more than a decade," Skarupski told Reuters Health.
The team of researchers evaluated calls received at a poison-information center in Pittsburgh in 1998-1999. During this time there were roughly 2.2 million phone calls to the center. Out of this total, 156,000 people were over the age of 50. The majority of calls pertained to children who had ingested a potentially poisonous substance.
In all, 775 callers later died and more than one third of the people who died (263) were over the age of 50, Skarupski reported.
"This is a really important statistic to note. While people over the age of 50 are only a small number of the total calls that come into the center, they make up more than a third of the fatalities associated with all the calls," Skarupski said.
Women were almost twice as likely to suffer short-term problems like having inhaled or ingested bleach products than men were.
"This makes sense since women are more likely to do cleaning," Skarupski pointed out.
On the other hand, women were also more likely (22.8% versus 17.7% for men) to take medications incorrectly over a long period of time.
"Chronic exposures were defined as continuous or reported exposures occurring over a period exceeding 8 hours," Skarupski told Reuters Health.
For instance, they might confuse one pill for another, take the medication repeatedly without realizing that they had already taken the drug, or take a friend's medication by accident, Skarupski explained.
"They may even use ear drops in their eye or vice versa," she added.
Those working in poison centers need to be mindful of the fact that even though most calls are concerning infants and children, the elderly make up a significant amount of the death rate due to poisoning, Skarupski noted.
"We need to target men and especially women over the age of 50 about the proper handling of medications and educate them about best practices to help them reduce confusion that may result in accidental poisonings," she said.
"As more and more people survive into old age, there will be an increase in the number of men and women who are on more medications that could result in more deaths due to accidental poisonings," Skarupski added.
Product design must also be reconsidered, she stressed.
"Take for example a man who inadvertently mistook (muscle-soothing cream) for toothpaste. He suffered serious reactions and had to be rushed to the hospital," Skarupski told Reuters Health.
"It's really important that marketers make their products look like medicine and provide ways for the elderly to reduce misuse," she concluded.
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