Adverse Drug Reactions Common, Deadly

Adverse drug reactions are an important cause of injury to hospitalized patients, but just how common are they? This meta-analysis pooled data from 39 prospective studies of drug reactions among more than 60,000 hospitalized patients. Adverse drug reactions included unintended and undesired effects at accepted doses, and excluded errors in administration, therapeutic failures, overdose, and drug abuse.

The incidence of serious adverse drug reactions to patients while in the hospital was 2%; fatal events occurred in 0.19%. When data on patients admitted for serious adverse drug reactions were included, the rate of such complications rose to 6.7%. Extending these findings to the U.S. population, the authors estimated that more than 700,000 Ame…