Have you ever wondered just how many people suffer from adverse drug reactions and how many die from them each year? An article published in the July 2000 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) investigated a variety of factors contributing to American health including adverse drug reactions.
According to the JAMA article, the number of estimated deaths from iatrogenic (i.e. due to the action of a physician or a therapy the doctor prescribed) damage is somewhere in the neighborhood of 225,000 and 284,000 per year! Broken down by category, using conservative numbers, it looks like this:
• 7,000 deaths per year from medication errors in hospitals
• 12,000 deaths per year from unnecessary surgery
• 20,000 deaths per year from other errors in hospitals
• 80,000 deaths per year from nosocomial infections in hospitals
• 106,000 deaths per year from nonerror, adverse effects of medications.
In 2005 there were a total of 2,448,017 total deaths in the United States which means that nearly 1 in every 200 deaths was because of drug side effects and about 1 in every 100 was due to iatrogenic damage! Another study published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society found that the drugs with the highest levels of adverse reactions were diuretics, calcium channel blockers, nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs, and digoxin. Take note that half of these drugs are some of the leading hypertension treatments!
It is important to keep in mind, however, that physicians and prescription drugs do save people’s lives too and that the largest category for causing fatalities, adverse effects of medications, is largely outside of the control of physicians.
A related study cited by the JAMA article revealed that out of 13 countries the United States ranked an average of 12th on 16 different health indicators. The United States ranked very poorly on most indicators, for example:
• 13th (last) for low-birth-weight percentages
• 13th for neonatal mortality and infant mortality overall
• 11th for post-neonatal mortality
• 13th for years of potential life lost (excluding external causes)
• 10th for age adjusted mortality
The other countries in the study, listed from best to worst on average, were Japan, Sweden, Canada, France, Australia, Spain, Finland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Belgium, the United States, and Germany.
Another study cited in the article was from the World Health Organization ranked the US 15th out of 25 among industrialized countries based on indicators such as disability-adjusted life expectancy, child survival to five years, and experiences with the health care system.
No doubt lifestyle traits contribute largely to the poor rankings for the U.S.; however, the U.S. ranks third best for smoking rates among women and remarkably well for animal fat consumption and cholesterol among men.
For more information see the original JAMA article at http://silver.neep.wisc.edu/~lakes/iatrogenic.pdf titled “Is US Health Really the Best in the World”. The death statistics mentioned can be found at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/FASTATS/deaths.htm and the article in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, titled “Adverse drug reactions as cause of hospital admissions: results from the Italian Group of Pharmacoepidemiology in the Elderly”, can be found http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12473007?dopt=Abstract.
