CNN
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Fatal overdoses involving fentanyl have increased in recent years in the US, and new research shows that deaths among children have risen significantly, mirroring trends among adults.
More than 5,000 children and adolescents have died from fentanyl overdoses in the past two decades, according to data published Monday in JAMA Pediatrics. More than half of those deaths occurred in the first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic.
There were about 1,550 pediatric deaths from fentanyl in 2021, more than 30 times more than in 2013, when the wave of synthetic opioid overdose deaths began in the US.
A surge that began in 2018 led to a nearly 3-fold increase in deaths among older adolescents and a nearly 6-fold increase among children under age 5. In 2021, 40 infants and 93 children ages 1 to 4 died from fentanyl overdoses.
However, since 1999, the vast majority of pediatric fentanyl deaths have occurred among adolescents 15 to 19 years of age.
“With older adolescents, the way poisonings occur is similar to what happens with adults. It’s recreational drug use, and then they intentionally take fentanyl or cut it into the drugs they’re using,” said Julie Gaither, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Yale Medical School who wrote the new research letter. “That’s a story that’s much easier to understand.”
For younger children, it’s more difficult to control exactly what happens inside the home, the most common place where overdose deaths occur, but often related to drugs left within reach.
“With fentanyl. I mean, it’s so potent that it doesn’t take much for them to take a lethal dose,” he said.
The number of fatal poisonings among children under 5 years of age has declined since the Poison Prevention Packaging Act was passed in 1970, when more difficult-to-open child-resistant containers became standard for many medications. other studies have shown.
But illicit drugs like fentanyl, which is 100 times stronger than morphine and can kill quickly, don’t come in child-resistant packaging.
The Covid-19 pandemic has also exacerbated the drug epidemic, with overdose deaths reaching record levels in 2021. Fentanyl was involved in approximately two-thirds of overdose deaths overall for people of all ages.
Multiple medications can be reported on a death certificate, and fentanyl is often found along with others, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Among children and adolescents, benzodiazepines (medications commonly prescribed to treat conditions such as anxiety and insomnia), as well as cocaine or psychostimulants, were also taken more than a third of the time, according to the new study.
These trends suggest that the “pediatric opioid crisis is changing in ways that will be more difficult to combat,” Gaither said.
Combating the crisis will require preventative measures such as safe storage and disposal of opioids that prevent exposure, as well as harm reduction strategies that include opioid use disorder treatment for both parents and adolescents and improved access to medication. reversal of naloxone overdose in homes, he said. .
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