Category: Medication Safety

NSAIDS Kill – Especially Diclofenac

While the protections for individuality make America the colorful place it is today, it sure is easy to run massive cohort studies in European countries where they sacrifice a little bit of anonymity for the common good.

Everyone in Denmark has a number, and they tracked every patient in Denmark with a history of MI to see if they had any adverse events after receiving a prescription for NSAIDs.  There were a few significant differences in the populations receiving each different kind of NSAID – rofecoxib and celecoxib tended to be given to older, female populations, and there were some differences throughout their groups regarding the prevalence of other co-administered cardiac medications.

This article really annoys me because the page with which they present their incidence of death by week has six charts that lend themselves immediately to visual comparison – but their chart scales are grossly different.  Ibuprofen looks terrible at first glance, but then you realize it has the smallest y-axis scale, and actually performs quite well.  In the end, they all demonstrated worsening of outcomes regarding death/MI compared to the total study population rate of death/MI not proximate to NSAID use.

In the end, ibuprofen and naproxen had the least effect on the OR for death; it is fair to avoid rofecoxib, celecoxib, and diclofenac in your routine prescribing without specific indications.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21555710

…and Here is Why the Elderly Are Falling

Orthostatic intolerance.

Not much more to say.

An entire quarter of their convenience sample of elderly (mostly female) volunteers had a 60 point drop in their blood pressure upon standing, with only a modicum of recovery within 2 minutes.

Antihypertensive polypharmacy was weakly associated with orthostatic intolerance, and the presence of orthostatic intolerance was weakly associated with an increased number of falls.

So, if the disease (hypertension) doesn’t harm you, the treatment will.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21438868

Pediatric Sedation with Propofol

Lovely descriptive statistics of 25,000 occurrences of propofol sedation in children.

Interestingly – 75% of their sedations occurred in radiology.  My experience has primarily been to sedate children for uncomfortable procedures – but I am aware that our pediatric critical care intensivists staff the MRI machine specifically to run sedations for children for imaging.

2.3% had “serious adverse events” – although their “other adverse events” includes 1.3% who had “unexpected need for PPV”, which, to me, seems rather serious.  1% had airway obstruction, another 1% had desaturation and 0.5% had apnea.  They also did some chart mining to see if anything showed up as associated with a serious adverse event.  The highest OR was only 4.6, and that was when an “upper respiratory” diagnosis was documented in the chart.  Other associations included prematurity, and then the addition of benzo, ketamine, anticholinergics, or opioids to the sedation.

I would say there are a couple emerging trends that might help further increase sedation safety – addition of end-tidal CO2 monitoring might give better warning of apnea and desaturation, and increased use of nitrous oxide may reduce the number of propofol sedations needed.  Otherwise – be ready for too much excitement in one out of fifty pediatric sedations.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21513827

News Flash: Dilaudid Treats Pain

Albert Einstein in Montefiore is singlehandedly, repeatedly pushing literature regarding appropriate titration of pain control in the Emergency Department.  They have several previously published papers describing their hydromorphone 1 + 1 protocol, describing its safety and efficacy.  This paper is their prospective, randomized version demonstrating its safety and superiority to “usual practice”.  You could implement their protocol tomorrow and have better narcotic pain control in your ED.  It clearly works.

But the real issue this line of research uncovers is not that they’ve discovered a magic protocol.  What we’re missing by taking the simple interpretation is more that our pain control in the ED is flawed.  If you look at the morphine equivalents their patients received in this article, they’re preposterous.  I am a huge proponent of 0.1mg/kg for morphine – even in adults – and their mean dose in the “usual care” arm was 6mg morphine equivalents, and their mean additional dose was 3mg.  0.1mg/kg is a starting dose for morphine that gives less than 50% of patients adequate pain relief – which is where the second part of their protocol comes in.  Scheduled reassessment for pain and a standing order for additional medication is another area where “usual care” will obviously fall behind, simply because of the uncontrollable chaos of the ED.

So, my take home from this article is that protocolized, standing orders for narcotic analgesia in appropriately selected patients is safe and effective, and, you can use their protocol or develop your own.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21507527

Oxy-Free ED

A little bit of a follow-up to yesterday’s post on adverse events – and because it was mentioned on EM:RAP a couple months ago.
This is the group up in Washington state that is trying to cut down on the number of narcotics being diverted from their Emergency Department into the community.  It’s a nice discussion and something that if you’re not already doing something about it, you’re not doing enough.  A unified strategy across their entire department helps keep patients and physicians on the same page and standardizes their treatment.  I know at a small critical access hospital at which I work, some patients will call ahead to see which physician is working – since they know they won’t be getting their usual fix with certain docs.

Everything is a Poison…

…when taken in inappropriate amounts.

The NYT reports on a recent AHRQ release that doesn’t tell us a lot that’s new – more hospital and ED visits are coded with medication side effects – a “50% increase since 2004”.  The problem with the lay article is that it focuses on these issues as “medication errors” as some alarming decline in quality in U.S. healthcare.  Part of the problem with this release is that it’s simply data – it’s not a study or a statistical analysis that attempts to control for other confounding influences – have the number of prescriptions for each of these classes gone up?  What’s the average age of these patients presenting with errors (i.e., aging boomers)?  There are a lot of other factors contributing to whether a medication results in an adverse effect, and they aren’t just “errors”.  The ED data isn’t all that insightful, although it is interesting to see how it differs from the inpatient errors.  The #1 culprit for the ED is “Other”, which is 261k compared to 118k opiate adverse events – which basically invalidates their data when most of your data points fall into an unknown category.