Overall, calls to poison centers are decreasing, but the number of serious cases is increasing

America’s poison control centers are treating increasingly serious cases that are significantly more likely to result in serious injury or death in both adults and children, according to a new study from the University of Virginia School of Medicine.

The study examined a 15-year period ending in 2021 and found that calls about “intentional exposure” leading to death increased by 234%. These calls include suicide attempts, illegal drug use, and prescription drug abuse.

The study is published in the news Clinical Toxicology.

The severity of ‘accidental exposures’ also increased, with those leading to serious harm (such as disfigurement or disability) increasing by more than a third and those leading to death rising by 65.3%. Those calls include mishaps such as taking the wrong dose of medication; exposure to harmful substances in the workplace and in the environment; bites and stings; and food poisoning.

The severity of cases among children had also increased. The number of intentional exposures in children that resulted in serious injury or death increased by 76.6%, while the overall number of cases decreased by 33%. The number of unintentional exposures that resulted in serious injury or death increased by 190% and 122.7%, respectively.

“As a society, we should be concerned about these trends regarding children,” says Dr. Christopher Holstege, director of UVA Health’s Blue Ridge Poison Center and chief of the Division of Medical Toxicology at the UVA School of Medicine. “We need to collectively devise a strategy to better identify the root causes of such serious cases of child poisoning, especially in the areas of mental health and substance use and abuse.

Understanding poisoning trends

With drug overdose deaths on the rise across the country, Holstege and his collaborators – UVA epidemiologist Rita Farah and Dr. Ryan J. Cole – wanted to get a better sense of the outcomes of the calls poison centers have received in recent years. So they reviewed more than 33.7 million poison exposures reported to the 55 poison control centers in the United States between January 1, 2007 and December 31, 2021.

The calls include:

• Nearly 8 million unintentional exposures among adults 19 years and older
• 3.9 million intentional adult exposures
• 18.7 million unintentional exposures in children
• More than 1.6 million intentional exposures in children

The researchers found that phone calls became more likely to result in serious injury or death over time, across all age groups. Calls about cases that had minor consequences, meanwhile, dropped.

That corresponded to what Holstege expected. “We were not surprised by the study’s findings. In fact, what prompted us to look at the data nationally is the increased severity of cases we are seeing at UVA Health’s Blue Ridge Poison Center,” he said. “The cause for this trend is multifactorial: we have experienced a growing mental health crisis among the nation’s youth, and we are finding an increasing number of dangerous new psychoactive substances such as synthetic opioids and designer benzodiazepines entering society.”