Based on 3,667 cases they found, they estimated there are about 23,000 ER visits each year for health problems related to supplements, and that about 2,154 lead to hospitalization.
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Dietary supplements send at least 23,000 Americans a year to the emergency room and cause at least 2,000 to be hospitalized, according to a study published online Wednesday.
The huge – and hugely popular – dietary supplement industry is largely unregulated. The most common symptoms were chest pain, palpitations, and elevated heart rate.
But the Food and Drug Administration has been warning consumers that many so-called natural supplements in fact do contain prescription drugs that are not marked on their labels. They say the numbers are small for ER visits in comparison to the number of people that take supplements but they do not take in account the number of people who may have developed long term issues or those who do not go to the ER because they were not injured severely enough to require emergency treatment, or just refused to go to the ER.
About 20% of supplement-related ER visits involved children who took the products while unsupervised, according to the study, which was co-written by researchers at the FDA.
The FDA’s hands-off approach extends to the packaging of dietary supplements.
“People may not realize that dietary supplements can cause any adverse effects”, said Geller, the author. Pills or pill fragments can get lodged in the windpipe or esophagus and can lead to complications.
One reason the estimates may be on the low side is that many people who have negative reactions to a dietary supplement never end up in a hospital emergency room, he said. “If you want echinacea, buy echinacea”, he said, referring to the herb that many people believe fights colds.
“If you put it in context that over 150 million Americans take dietary supplements each year, we have, ‘Far less than one-tenth of 1 percent of supplement users will visit the ER, ‘ ” says Duffy MacKay, a naturopathic doctor and the senior vice president for scientific and regulatory affairs at the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a trade group.
Nationwide, that would translate to 23,000 ER visits each year, Geller’s team estimated.
“The number of emergency department visits attributed to supplement-related adverse events that we identified is probably an underestimation, since supplement use is underreported by patients, and physicians may not identify adverse events associated with supplements as often as they do those associated with pharmaceuticals”, the researchers said. Emergency room staff rarely ask people about supplements or vitamins – unless someone is very obviously choking on one.
“We don’t have information about what’s contained in these products”, Geller says. “In the supplement world, more is not necessarily good”.
The FDA, under the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, is barred from reviewing dietary supplements for safety before they hit the market. The FDA can order a product off the market if it is found to be unsafe. “They are in their 20s to 30s, which shows there are risks to these products”.
The FDA has a website that lists the known adulterated supplements.
The key difference between drugs and supplements, Fabricant said, is that supplements are regulated like a category of food, rather than medication. Patients should always tell their doctors if they are taking dietary supplements, and which ones.
For now, Cohen suggested that consumers avoid such combination supplements.
If you have a heart condition, talk to your doctor before you start taking a weight loss or energy supplement.
All medicines and dietary supplements should be stored up, away, and out of sight from young children. “If it costs these companies a little more money to do that, that’s OK”.
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“You can childproof your home, but that doesn’t mean that children are not amazingly creative” about getting into trouble, Kaplan said. “There’s a few personal responsibility here” on the part of parents who fail to supervise their children, he said.
